What are the largest cities in the Netherlands?

That Amsterdam is the largest city in the Netherlands will surprise nobody. Below the top few, the list is less obvious, and some of the names on it are not cities at all. On 1 January 2026, Amsterdam had 941,927 residents, ahead of Rotterdam with 673,804 and The Hague with 569,468. The country as a whole had 18,130,208.

The 25 largest municipalities in the Netherlands

These are the 25 municipalities with the most residents on 1 January 2026, from Statistics Netherlands. The change is the number of residents gained or lost since 1 January 2025, and density is residents per square kilometre of land.

A municipality is not always one city. Statistics Netherlands counts people by municipality, and some large municipalities are a cluster of towns, which the next sections come back to. The names with a link are the 17 cities PlanetExpat covers in depth.

How many people live in Amsterdam?

Amsterdam had 941,927 residents on 1 January 2026, about 5 percent of everyone in the country. That was 7,401 more than a year earlier, growth of 0.8 percent against 0.5 percent nationally.

Since 2022 the municipality also includes Weesp, which is why Amsterdam has two official places of residence in the address register. About 39 percent of its residents were born outside the Netherlands, and it has about 4,954 residents per square kilometre.

Some of the largest are not one city

Haarlemmermeer, number 14 on the list, has no town of that name. It is a municipality of 25 official places, the largest of them Hoofddorp. Westland, just outside the top 25 at 26th, is the same: 10 places, among them Naaldwijk and Monster. Zaanstad, at 15, groups 8 places around Zaandam.

So if you are looking for the largest cities rather than the largest municipalities, these belong in a different category. Their totals are real, but they describe a group of towns and villages, each much smaller than the municipality as a whole.

Which large cities are growing fastest?

Among the 25 largest, Zaanstad and Arnhem grew the most in the year to 1 January 2026, both by about 1.5 percent, followed by Almere at 1.3 percent. Two got smaller: Groningen, by just 14 residents, and Leiden, by 310. With Zoetermeer growing at the same time, it overtook Leiden: Zoetermeer is now 20th with 130,836 residents, Leiden 21st with 130,328.

One year of change is a small window, and growth in a single year can come from one large new housing project. Use it as a sign of where building is happening, not as a trend on its own.

Where people live most closely together

The Hague is the most densely populated of the 25, with 6,863 residents per square kilometre, followed by Leiden at 5,944 and Haarlem at 5,785. Amsterdam, the largest by far, ranks only 4th: the three smaller cities fit more people onto each square kilometre of land.

Density often says more about daily life than size does: how far the shops are, how much green space there is, and how many neighbours share the same street. Our story on the best places to live compares the cities on those everyday figures.

What population figures do and do not tell you

A large city is not automatically a better or a busier one to live in, and two municipalities of the same size can feel completely different. The population figure tells you how much city there is, not what it is like.

To see what the cities are like inside, compare their neighbourhoods in the explorer, open one of the cities we cover, or check how the figures are built on our data sources page.