CBS: Population grows most strongly in small municipalities around large cities NOW

Relatively speaking, the population in smaller municipalities around the major cities grew the most last year, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) reported Friday on the basis of provisional figures. More and more residents of other municipalities are choosing to relocate to Diemen, Zuidplas and Waddinxveen, for example.

Relatively speaking, the population in Diemen grew the fastest. No fewer than 54 per thousand inhabitants were added. With various new construction projects, Diemen mainly attracted families from nearby Amsterdam.

Similar examples of growing municipalities around major cities are Zuidplas near Rotterdam and Son en Breugel near Eindhoven.

In an absolute sense, most of the residents joined in the big cities. At the top is Amsterdam, where eleven thousand inhabitants attended. Almost eight thousand new people came to live in The Hague, seven thousand in Rotterdam and five thousand in Utrecht.

Dutch population grew through immigration

The Dutch population grew in 2019 with an estimated 132 thousand people to more than 17.4 million inhabitants. This is mainly because the number of people coming to the Netherlands from abroad is still increasing. It was expected there were 272,000 last year.

Almost half of the immigrants come from Europe, of whom 34,000 are Dutch. In recent years more and more inhabitants of European countries have come to the Netherlands. This development has continued over the past year. Asia is in second place with 18 percent.

The Netherlands received sixteen thousand asylum seekers last year, equivalent to 16 percent of all immigrants. Just as in 2018, the number of emigrants is 158,000. The population has also grown because more children were born than people died. The natural increase, as CBS calls it, was therefore three thousand higher than in 2018.