Not surprisingly, the capital of the Netherlands is also its largest city. At around *******, Amsterdam has over ******* inhabitants more than the second-largest city in the country, Rotterdam. The Hague and Utrecht, the third and fourth-largest cities in the Netherlands, together have approximately as many inhabitants as Amsterdam alone. Amsterdam and the pressure on the housing market A rapidly growing city, Amsterdam’s population increased from roughly ***** thousand to around ***** thousand in the last decade. This has created pressure on the real estate market, where average rent and housing prices have skyrocketed. In the first quarter of 2010, the average rent of residential property amounted to roughly ***** euros per square meter. In the first quarter of 2021, this had increased to over ***** euros per square meter.  2030 Outlook  In the nearby future, Amsterdam is set to remain the Netherlands’ largest city. According to a recent forecast, by 2030 Amsterdam will have broken the barrier of one million inhabitants. Rotterdam, Den Haag and Utrecht are forecast to grow too, albeit at a much lower pace. In 2030, Rotterdam is expected to reach just under ******* inhabitants.

According to this population forecast, in 2030 Amsterdam will remain the largest city in the Netherlands. It is forecast that the capital will have over *********** inhabitants in 2030. Rotterdam, currently the second-largest city in the country, will keep its spot. By 2030, the population of Rotterdam is expected to reach just under ******* people.

This statistic shows the average number of months a house is for sale in the largest cities in the Netherlands in the second quarter of 2017. In the second quarter of 2017, it would take approximately 10 months to sell a house in Amsterdam. In the four largest municipalities, the demand of housing outweighs the supply. In December 2016, the average number of houses for sale in the municipality of Amsterdam was approximately ***** with this number reaching an average of ***** in December 2014.

We investigated the socioeconomic scaling behavior of all cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants in the Netherlands and found significant superlinear scaling of the gross urban product with population size. Of these cities, 22 major cities have urban agglomerations and urban areas defined by the Netherlands Central Bureau of Statistics. For these major cities we investigated the superlinear scaling for three separate modalities: the cities defined as municipalities, their urban agglomerations and their urban areas. We find superlinearity with power-law exponents of around 1.15. But remarkably, both types of agglomerations underperform if we compare for the same size of population an agglomeration with a city as a municipality. In other words, an urban system as one formal municipality performs better as compared to an urban agglomeration with the same population size. This effect is larger for the second type of agglomerations, the urban areas. We think this finding has important implications for urban policy, in particular municipal reorganizations. A residual analysis suggests that cities with a municipal reorganization recently and in the past decades have a higher probability to perform better than cities without municipal restructuring.

Paris was Western Europe's largest city in 1650, with an estimated 400 thousand inhabitants, which is almost double it's population 150 years previously. In second place is London, with 350 thousand inhabitants, however it has grown by a substantially higher rate than Paris during this time, now seven times larger than it was in the year 1500. Naples remains in the top three largest cities, growing from 125 to 300 thousand inhabitants during this time. In the previous list, the Italian cities of Milan and Venice were the only other cities with more than one hundred thousand inhabitants, however in this list they have been joined by the trading centers of Lisbon and Amsterdam, the capital cities of the emerging Portuguese and Dutch maritime empires.

Famous for its port and football club Feyenoord, Rotterdam is the second largest city in the Netherlands after Amsterdam. In the last decade, Rotterdam’s population increased year on year, and in 2023, the city reached over 663,900 inhabitants. By comparison: that year Amsterdam’s population amounted to just under 883,000.

 Leading European container port   

The port of Rotterdam is one of the largest ports in the world. In 2020, roughly 8.436 million containers were processed here, making it Europe’s largest container port, before Antwerp and Hamburg. In 2018, the port of Rotterdam processed 289 million tons of bulk cargo.

Feyenoord, pride of Rotterdam  

Feyenoord Rotterdam is one of the most successful football clubs in Dutch history, with 15 national titles, 13 Dutch cups, three European cups and one World Cup won. As of September 2019, Feyenoord had the third highest market value of all Dutch football clubs, after Ajax and PSV. That month, Feyenoord’s market value reached 122.55 million euros.

The statistic illustrates the inbound tourism to the four main cities in the Netherlands from 2010 to 2014. The number of international visitors increased for all four cities between 2010 and 2014. Most tourists were found in and around Amsterdam with roughly *** million tourists in 2014, an increase of roughly *********** tourists when comparing it to the year 2010. When looking at the other cities, there were significantly less tourists than in Amsterdam. Rotterdam was the second city with the most tourists, approximately ******* in 2014. The Hague attracted roughly a little less than ******* tourists, whereas Utrecht attracted roughly *******. In general, looking at the forecast of inbound tourism for the Netherlands, it is estimated that in 2018 approximately **** million tourists will visit the Netherlands. To compare, in 2017 there were roughly **** million tourists, which means an increase of roughly half a million tourists in 2018.

Rent prices per square meter in the largest Dutch cities have been on an upward trend after a slight decline in 2020. Amsterdam remained the most expensive city to live in, averaging a monthly rent of 27.6 euros per square meter for residential real estate in the private rental sector. Monthly rents in Utrecht were around six euros cheaper per square meter. Both cities were above the average rent price of residential property in the Netherlands overall, whereas Rotterdam and The Hague were slightly below that. Buying versus renting, what do the Dutch prefer? The Netherlands is one of Europe’s leading countries when it comes to homeownership, having funded this with a mortgage. In 2023, around 60 percent of people living in the Netherlands were homeowners with a mortgage. This is because Dutch homeowners were able to for many years to deduct interest paid from pre-tax income (a system known in the Netherlands as hypotheekrenteaftrek). This resulted in the Netherlands having one of the largest mortgage debts across the European continent. Total mortgage debt of Dutch households reached a value of approximately 803 billion euros in 2023. Is the Dutch housing market overheating? There are several indicators for the Netherlands that allow to investigate whether the housing market is overheating or not. House price indices corrected for inflation in the Netherlands suggest, for example, that prices have declined since 2022. The Netherlands’ house-price-to-rent-ratio, on the other hand, has exceeded the pre-crisis level in 2019. These figures, however, are believed to be significantly higher for cities like Amsterdam, as it was suggested for a long time that the prices of owner-occupied houses were increasing faster than rents in the private rental sector.

The region of Noord-Holland, whose largest city is Amsterdam, recorded the highest number of international hotel guests in the Netherlands in 2024, with approximately 9.5 million guests. Zuid-Holland reported the second-highest figure that year with 2.3 million visitors.

Between 2007 and 2020, the number of coffeeshops in Rotterdam declined. In 2007, the second-largest city in the Netherlands counted just over ** coffeeshops. Two years later, this had fallen to **. In 2020, there were ** coffeeshops in the city.

This statistic shows the market share of buy-to-let (BTL) property sales in the four biggest cities of the Netherlands, namely Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht, in 2017. Buy-to-let is a British term referring to private investors who purchase property (excluding holiday homes) so they can rent it out. In essence, it's a type of investment from the landlord.

The source states that since 2015 the buy-to-let market accelerated in the Netherlands with the number of buy-to-let mortgages reaching ****** in 2017. Interest is mostly focusing on the four big cities, with Rotterdam the stand-out buy-to-let city with a market share of approximately ** percent. In the second quarter of 2018, Rotterdam had a rent of approximately ***** euros per square meter. This was less than the national average of approximately ***** euros per square meters. Amsterdam, however, was more expensive.

In 2022 the GDP per capita in the Netherlands was ****** euros. During this year, the province with the highest GDP per capita was North Holland, which includes the capital city of Amsterdam, at ****** thousand euros. The province with the second-highest GDP per capita was Utrecht, which includes the city of Utrecht, at ****** euros. The province with the lowest GDP per capita was Drenthe at ****** euros.

Hotels in Noord-Holland, the Dutch region that includes the city of Amsterdam, recorded the highest number of domestic tourists' overnight stays in the Netherlands in 2024. That year, domestic visitors spent roughly eight million hotel nights in Noord-Holland. Zuid-Holland reported the second-highest figure in 2024, with around 4.7 million hotel nights by domestic travelers.