You sign a rental contract in The Hague, register your address, and then a letter or a postcode lookup says you live in 's-Gravenhage. Nothing went wrong. It is the same city with three names: 's-Gravenhage is the formal Dutch name, Den Haag the everyday one that the city itself uses, and The Hague the English one.
Three names for one city
Each name belongs to a different setting. In daily life you will almost only hear and read Den Haag. The formal name survives in the records that most newcomers never look at until they have to.
| Name | Language | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
| The Hague | English | International organisations, English-language media and this site |
| Den Haag | Dutch, everyday | The municipality itself, the main railway station (Den Haag Centraal) and almost every conversation |
| 's-Gravenhage | Dutch, formal | The official address register, Statistics Netherlands and other formal records |
All three refer to exactly the same municipality, with one official code, GM0518. There is no separate town called 's-Gravenhage next to Den Haag.
What 's-Gravenhage means
The short name came first. Die Haghe, roughly 'the enclosed place', grew up around a hunting lodge that Floris IV, Count of Holland, had built in the woods here in the early thirteenth century. The oldest known written mention is from 1242, when Count William II lived there.
The longer name is a contraction of des Graven hage, 'the count's enclosure'. According to the Dutch language advice service Onze Taal it only came into use as the more formal name in the early seventeenth century, centuries after Die Haghe. The apostrophe and s at the start are what is left of the old word des, 'of the'.
Where you will run into 's-Gravenhage as a newcomer
The national address register lists the place of residence as 's-Gravenhage. Look up any address in the city, such as the town hall at Spui 70, and it comes back as 'Spui 70, 2511BT 's-Gravenhage'. Anything that prints your official address can use that form, and Statistics Netherlands lists the municipality the same way.
The same pattern applies to Den Bosch, whose formal name is 's-Hertogenbosch: the register gives 'Markt 1, 5211JV 's-Hertogenbosch'. If an alphabetical list puts The Hague under S, this is why.
The Hague in figures
Whatever you call it, The Hague is the third-largest of the 17 cities we cover, with about 569,000 residents. It also has the highest share of residents born abroad, 39 percent, just ahead of Amsterdam.
An average home sold for about €465k in 2025, and households had about €56.7k a year to spend after tax. For how that compares, see our stories on home prices and income across the Dutch cities.
Choosing where to live in The Hague
The name matters less than the neighbourhood. The Hague runs from the beach at Scheveningen to dense inner-city streets, and the figures change a lot from one district to the next.
You can compare every neighbourhood in the city in the explorer, open the city page to see all its districts, browse other cities, or read how the figures are built on our data sources page.