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CBS data on where millionaire households cluster — and why that's a class map, not a "best places to live" ranking
Part of: Dutch Economy
Dutch CBS publishes household wealth data down to the municipality level, and it produces a genuinely useful map: where millionaire households cluster, and where they almost never appear. It's worth reading carefully, because the headline ("richest places in the Netherlands") is easy to misread as "nicest places to live." It isn't that. It's a map of ownership, inheritance, and old money — not of quality of life.
The most recent CBS figures, published 8 October 2025, cover 1 January 2024 (provisional): the Netherlands had 451,800 millionaire households — households with net wealth (CBS's definition: owner-occupied home, savings, investments, business shareholdings, and other property, minus mortgage and other debt) of €1 million or more. That's 5.5% of all Dutch households, up about 17,000 from the year before, with average wealth among this group of roughly €1.6 million. About two-thirds of millionaire households hold between €1 million and €2 million — this is mostly upper-middle-class property and pension wealth, not yacht money. (CBS, 8 October 2025)
This has grown fast: in 2021 there were 317,000 millionaire households (4%); by 2022 it was 403,000 (5%); by 2024 it's 451,800 (5.5%). Rising house prices and investment portfolios account for most of the increase — not a sudden wave of new fortunes. (CBS, 2023; CBS, 2025)
Provincially, Noord-Holland and Utrecht have the highest concentration, now at 7% of households each. Groningen, Flevoland, and Limburg have the lowest, under 4%. (CBS, 2025)
At municipality level, the top is dominated by a small cluster of villages around Amsterdam and the Gooi region:
These are not big cities. They're small, old, wealthy commuter villages — the Dutch equivalent of the Surrey stockbroker belt or Cairo's Zamalek/Maadi old-money pockets: places where wealth was built or inherited generations ago and stayed concentrated through property and family networks, rather than places currently generating new wealth.
The bottom is concentrated in South Limburg's former mining region, plus two outliers near Rotterdam and in the north:
Kerkrade, Brunssum, and Heerlen all sit in the old South Limburg coal-mining belt, which lost its main industry in the 1960s–70s and never fully replaced it economically — a regional decline that still shows up in wealth statistics half a century later. Nissewaard, near Rotterdam, and Den Helder, a navy and fishing town in the far north of Noord-Holland, are industrial and working-class in a very different way from the Gooi villages at the top — proof that being in a "rich province" (Noord-Holland) says little about any one municipality within it.
The important nuance: this ranks share of millionaire households, not average income, not happiness, not liveability, and not "how nice a place is." A municipality can have almost no millionaires and still be a genuinely good place to live — cheaper, more affordable for young families, better public services relative to cost. Conversely, a high millionaire share often reflects old wealth and property values, not thriving local economic activity: Bloemendaal and Laren are not job centres; they're where people with money — often made or inherited elsewhere, frequently in nearby Amsterdam — choose to live.
Read this as a map of capital concentration and inherited advantage, layered on top of Housing geography: villages with large, old, expensive houses and strict building restrictions accumulate wealthy long-term residents, while former industrial regions carry the opposite legacy.
This kind of data is a useful corrective to how "nice neighbourhood" gets talked about in the Netherlands. Dutch public discourse likes to present itself as egalitarian and consensus-driven (see Poldermodel), but wealth concentration by postcode is real and persistent, and it tracks closely with property ownership, inheritance, and regional economic history rather than with effort or current productivity. It's a good check against reading any single "best municipality" list at face value.
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