The Netherlands has no states. Its European territory is divided into 12 provinces (provincies), and three Caribbean islands, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba, are special municipalities that belong to no province. South Holland is the most populous province, with 3,804,906 residents on 1 January 2023 according to Statistics Netherlands (CBS), and it contains The Hague, the seat of government. Friesland is the largest province including water, at 5,753 km², while Gelderland is the largest by land area, at 4,960 km². Utrecht is the smallest by total area (1,560 km²), and Zeeland has the fewest people (391,124). Flevoland, created on 1 January 1986 almost entirely on land reclaimed from the sea, is the newest. Amsterdam, the constitutional capital, lies in North Holland, whose provincial capital is Haarlem.
Each province has a provincial council (Provinciale Staten) of 39 to 55 members, elected every four years. The council supports a provincial executive of three to seven deputies, and both are chaired by a King’s commissioner appointed by the Crown for six years. The councils matter nationally too: within three months of each provincial election, their members elect the Senate. The last provincial elections were held in 2023 and the next are due in 2027. For statistics, CBS groups the provinces into four parts of the country (landsdelen), used as the Dutch NUTS-1 regions, and they are a useful way to see how different the provinces are. Every population figure below is the CBS count for 1 January 2023.
The count of 12 is the result of two centuries of redrawing. In 1588 seven provinces formed the Republic of the Seven United Provinces: Holland, Zeeland, Gelderland, Utrecht, Friesland, Overijssel and Groningen. From 1798 to 1801 the Batavian Republic briefly replaced them with eight departments named mostly after rivers, such as the Department of the Amstel around Amsterdam. The provinces returned in modern form in 1815, but as subdivisions of a national state rather than near-sovereign members. After Belgium broke away, Limburg was divided between the two countries in 1839, and Holland was split in two in 1840, giving 11. Flevoland made 12 in 1986. Today the provinces have seven core tasks, among them spatial planning and water management, regional public transport and the regional economy, and they are largely financed by the national government.
North Netherlands: Groningen, Friesland and Drenthe
The three northern provinces hold 1,757,677 people across 11,388 km² of land and water, about a tenth of the national population on more than a quarter of the total area. Friesland, governed from Leeuwarden, has 659,551 residents and 18 municipalities. It is the largest province by total area, but 2,413 km² of its 5,753 km² is water. Its official languages are West Frisian and Dutch, and almost all Frisian speakers are bilingual. In 1996 the provincial council resolved that the official name should follow the Frisian spelling, Fryslân, and the national government confirmed the change in 2004. Friesland is joined to North Holland by the Afsluitdijk, the 32 km dam built between 1927 and 1932 that closed off the Zuiderzee.
Groningen (596,075 people, 10 municipalities) takes its name from its capital city. In 1959 drillers near Slochteren found what became the largest natural gas field in Europe. Its revenue helped fund the Dutch welfare state, but from 1991 extraction was accompanied by earthquakes that damaged houses, and the government announced in June 2023 that production would stop by 1 October 2023. Drenthe (502,051) has been a province only since 1796. Under the Dutch Republic it kept its own institutions but had no seat in the States General. Its capital is Assen, but the largest municipality is Emmen, and at 191 people per km² it is the most thinly populated province in the European Netherlands.
East Netherlands: Overijssel, Gelderland and Flevoland
The east has 3,762,742 people on 10,969 km². Gelderland, whose capital is Arnhem and largest city Nijmegen, has 2,133,708 residents, 51 municipalities and the largest land area of any province. It continues the duchy of Gelderland, one of the seven provinces of the Dutch Republic. Its Veluwe, the largest push moraine complex in the Netherlands, holds the Hoge Veluwe National Park, about 55 km² of heath, drift sand and woodland near Ede, Arnhem and Apeldoorn. Overijssel (1,184,333 people) is governed from Zwolle, but its biggest city is Enschede in the Twente region near the German border. Its name means "beyond the IJssel", as seen from the bishops of Utrecht, who held the territory until 1528.
Flevoland is a province built in living memory. When the Afsluitdijk was finished, the former Zuiderzee became the freshwater IJsselmeer, and in the 1950s and 1960s engineers drained the Flevopolders inside it. In 1986 those polders were joined with the older Noordoostpolder to form the twelfth province. It has 444,701 people in just six municipalities. The capital is Lelystad, but the largest city is Almere, which did not exist before 1976 and is now one of the ten largest cities in the country. Measured by dry land alone, 1,410 km², Flevoland is the smallest province.
West Netherlands: the two Hollands, Utrecht and Zeeland
Almost half the country, 8,536,295 people, lives in the four western provinces on 11,893 km². Holland was the largest and most populous province of the old Republic until it was split in 1840 into North Holland and South Holland. The pair now hold 6.76 million people between them. North Holland (2,952,622) is governed from Haarlem, though Amsterdam is its largest municipality. South Holland (3,804,906) has its capital at The Hague, where parliament and the government sit, and its largest city at Rotterdam. With 1,410 residents per km² of land it is also the most densely populated province. Fifteen kilometres east of Rotterdam, at Kinderdijk, 19 windmills built around 1740 to drain the Alblasserwaard polder have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997.
Utrecht (1,387,643 people) is the smallest province by total area and was one of the seven provinces of the Dutch Republic formed in 1588. Zeeland, governed from Middelburg, is the westernmost and least populous province. Its 391,124 people live on islands and peninsulas in the delta of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt, plus Zeelandic Flanders against the Belgian border; its largest municipality is Terneuzen. Of its 2,933 km², 1,154 km² is water, and much of the land lies below sea level. After the North Sea flood of 1953, the Delta Works, a series of dams and storm surge barriers, were built to protect the delta from the North Sea. The largest of them, the Oosterscheldekering between Schouwen-Duiveland and Noord-Beveland, was built between April 1976 and June 1986 and opened by Queen Beatrix on 4 October 1986.
South Netherlands: North Brabant and Limburg
The two southern provinces have 3,754,577 people on 7,292 km². Under the Dutch Republic both lay mostly in the Generality Lands, territories governed directly by the States General rather than represented in it. North Brabant was Staats-Brabant until 1 January 1796, when it and Drenthe became the eighth and ninth provinces. It took its present name in 1815. With 2,626,210 people it is the third most populous province, and with 56 municipalities it has more than any other. The capital is ’s-Hertogenbosch, but Eindhoven, with about 249,000 residents in 2025 the fifth-largest city in the country, and Tilburg and Breda are all bigger. Its economy is the third largest after the two Hollands.
Limburg (1,128,367 people), with its capital at Maastricht, is the southernmost province: a long strip along the Meuse between Belgium and Germany. Its present shape dates from 1839, when the older province of Limburg was divided between the Netherlands and the newly separated Belgium, so both countries now have a province of the same name. At its southeastern tip is the Vaalserberg, 322.4 m above the Amsterdam datum (NAP). It is the highest point in the European Netherlands and marks the tripoint with Germany and Belgium. Maastricht also gave its name to the 1992 treaty that founded the European Union.
Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba: Dutch but outside any province
When the Netherlands Antilles was dissolved on 10 October 2010, three of its islands became part of the Netherlands itself as special municipalities, formally public bodies. Together they are called the Caribbean Netherlands. They are not part of any province. Bonaire, governed from Kralendijk, covers 294 km² and had 20,104 residents in 2019; Sint Eustatius (Oranjestad) had 3,138 on 21 km²; and Saba (The Bottom) had 1,915 on 13 km². Their arrival moved the country’s highest point. Mount Scenery, the dormant volcano that forms Saba, rises to about 870 m, well above the Vaalserberg. EU law does not apply automatically on the islands, which are overseas territories of the European Union. Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten are a separate case: they are constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, not part of the Netherlands itself.
That distinction, between the Kingdom, the country and the two provinces that share the name Holland, causes most of the confusion, and it is untangled in our explainer on Holland versus the Netherlands. The cities that anchor each province are ranked in the list of the largest cities in the Netherlands, and the way provincial councils feed into the Senate is covered in the guide to the Dutch government.