• A. Approximately 14.5 million
  • B. Approximately 17.9 million
  • C. Approximately 21.2 million
  • D. Approximately 24.6 million

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Think about it: The Netherlands is growing, but not at a breakneck pace. If you compare it with Belgium (approximately 11.5 million) and Germany (around 84 million), you’ll get a pretty good idea of where we fall in between.

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The correct answer is B. Approximately 17.9 million inhabitants.

At the beginning of 2026, around 17.9 million people live in the Netherlands. Each year, between 100,000 and 120,000 inhabitants are added – a combination of births, deaths, and people moving here or leaving. The growth has actually remained quite stable over the years, though it does fluctuate somewhat depending on economic conditions and world events.

The Netherlands is, by the way, one of the most densely populated countries in the world with approximately 520 people per square kilometer. That’s more than ten times as crowded as the United States! In the Randstad alone, more than 8 million people live in a relatively small area. That immediately explains why the traffic jams here are so long, right?

📚 More background information

The growth of the Netherlands is truly spectacular when you look at it this way. In 1900, we only had 5.1 million inhabitants – not even a third of what we have now! We made the biggest leap in the 1950s and 1960s, during the post-war baby boom. Back then, the Netherlands grew by more than 150,000 people per year. That was a real explosion.

Statistics Netherlands (CBS) naturally monitors all of this closely. Their forecasts predict that we’ll reach 19 million around 2040, after which growth will likely level off. Aging plays a major role in this: we’re getting older on average and more and more people are over 65.

What’s also striking: we’re really not evenly distributed across the country. Utrecht and South Holland are bursting at the seams (Utrecht has more than 1,300 inhabitants per km²!), while Zeeland, Drenthe, and Friesland are nice and quiet. Amsterdam itself has about 920,000 inhabitants within the city limits, but if you count the entire region, you get more than 2.4 million. That’s almost as much as all of Zeeland, North Brabant, and Limburg combined!

And we haven’t even talked about how diverse the Netherlands has become. About a quarter of all Dutch people have a migration background. The largest groups come from Turkey, Morocco, Suriname, and Poland. This makes the Netherlands one of the most multicultural countries in Europe – you can hear it immediately in our cities, where sometimes as many as 150 different nationalities live.