[GIS] Seeking postcode shapefiles & census data for Netherlands

censusdatanetherlandspostal-code

I would like to do some GIS mapping of the Netherlands, but I am having trouble finding official data files for the following:

  • Shapefiles for postcodes.
  • Census (population) data for postcodes.
  • And/or lookup files to relate postcodes to other Census small areas (if they exist)

Of course I'm hampered by not speaking Dutch.

Can anyone direct me to such data -preferably governmental data not commercial data?

Best Answer

Things have changed since 2015 I guess, currently there are multiple free methods to obtain data and geometry of postal codes. It is unfortunately slightly harder to find when one cannot read Dutch.

I've summarized the different ways of obtaining postal code data of The Netherlands below, the methods may lead to the same data.

  • On the page "Kerncijfers per postcode" ("Key postal code figures") of the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) you can find recent (2018-2020) demographic data in a shapefile on a PC4 level1.
    The same page has older (2008-2017) data on a PC5 and PC6 level.
  • PDOK provides geographic data in The Netherlands. Amongst other things they have a WFS and WMS feed for the same CBS PC4 and PC6 data.

    • Note that the PDOK services are limited to 1000 records per call. If you want to retrieve all data, you need to use paging, by appending this parameter: &startindex={starting at this 0-based index}

    • PDOK has a QGIS plugin allowing you to easily add the postal code data in QGIS as a layer, without manually downloading the shapefile.

    • To retrieve the number of residents per PC4 zone in 2017 you could use the following URL parameters:

https://geodata.nationaalgeoregister.nl/cbspostcode4/wfs?request=GetFeature&service=WFS&version=2.0.0&typeName=postcode42017&propertyName=(postcode,aantal_inwoners)&outputFormat=json

1. PC4 indicates that only the first four characters of the postal code are used as a key, e.g. if the full postal code is 1011AA, the data aggregates information for all postal codes starting with 1011.
Similarly PC5 refers to the first 5 characters (e.g. all postal codes starting with 1011A). PC6 is equal to the full postal code.

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