Officiële Bekendmakingen

‘Officiële Bekendmakingen’ contains what the Dutch government has formally published: local authority licences and by-laws, provincial and water board decisions, ministerial regulations, parliamentary documents and laws. This is the source that has legal effect, as public notice is the act by which a decision comes into force.

The data comes from KOOP, the Knowledge and Operations Centre for Official Government Publications, via a public search service at repository.overheid.nl ].

What’s inside

Determined on 15 August 2026 by a measurement carried out by the service itself. The complete repository contains 7,264,523 records across seven product areas. BesluitBron provides access to one of these, the official publications, comprising 6,612,875 records.

The thirteen publication lists add up exactly to 6,612,875. The breakdown is therefore complete and nothing is omitted.

What sets it apart from council information

A council proposal in the ‘Open Raadsinformatie’ sets out the process leading to a decision. The public notice in this register marks the point at which that decision takes effect, and the date from which the time limits for objections and appeals begin to run.

From a legal perspective, that difference is crucial. “The council has made this decision” and “this was announced on this date” are two different statements, with two different sources.

What is available for each publication

The official files for each publication can be accessed directly: the XML, HTML, PDF and metadata. The text on which a reader relies is therefore the text as published, and not a derivative thereof.

Restrictions

• The search service has a query limit. A broad search across millions of records is costly and is subject to limits. Applying a filter by official gazette, body or period makes the results both quicker and more useful;
• The register contains what has been published. It does not contain what has been decided but not published. A decision that has been wrongly withheld from publication will always be missing from this register;
• The historical parliamentary documents from 1814 to 1995 are part of a different product area, Staten-Generaal Digitaal, which BesluitBron does not provide access to;
• The search keywords do not contain any retention instructions. BesluitBron therefore buffers the data on its own side, based on the nature of the data; see Buffering en Doorlooptijd.

Address and tools

Address: https://besluitbron.nl/mcp/officielebekendmakingen/v1.

• search_publications: search the official publications, with filters by official journal, administrative body and period. Using match, you can choose how the words are combined: phrase side by side, all_words all appearing somewhere in the text, any_word at least one of them, near close to each other, and auto starts with the phrase and repeats with all the words if that yields no results. Measured on stikstof vergunning: 32, 9,696, 3,340,773, 1,734. The distance on near is chosen by the source itself; it cannot be set here;
• get_publication: a single publication with its metadata;
• get_publication_text: the official text of a publication, as published;
• recent_publications: recent announcements, for example to keep track of a current term;
• search_by_location: search by town or area – the most frequently asked question regarding local authority planning permission;
• list_publicationss: the official journals, along with their scope and the level of government to which they belong;
• list_publishers: the governing bodies that publish;
• list_document_types: the types of publications, from licences to regulations;
• data_freshnesss: the date up to which the register is up to date;
• list_platform_calls: the calls to the platform in this session.

In addition, list_capabilities.

Where to find this platform

These addresses belong to the organisation behind this source and not to BesluitBron. Anyone who finds an error in the data or in this source’s API should report it there:

• to report a technical fault: by email to cup@koop.overheid.nl;
• Ask another question: KOOP Contact and Support ;
• Read the API: Files and reuse ;
• Search for it yourself on the source’s website: zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl .

KOOP does not have a public issue tracker. This is therefore the only source for which an email address is listed here instead of a web page address: the CUP address is the channel for technical matters and does not appear on any page on the KOOP website itself, so linking to a page would direct a reporter to the general service desk rather than to the correct point of contact. The documentation page refers to the SRU 2.0 Manual, which describes the interface.

KOOP has been part of Logius since 2023, and Logius has announced that, as of 1 January 2026, addresses on @koop.overheid.nl have been replaced by @logius.nl. The CUP address given above is the one we are aware of and are recording here; if you get no response, please try using @logius.nl instead.

These addresses were checked on 18 August 2026. Where an organisation publishes an address on its own webpage, BesluitBron links to that page rather than reproducing the address: the page is automatically kept up to date. This source is the exception, for the reason stated above.

What this source is suitable for

For any matter where the public notice itself constitutes the legal act: when was it published, in which journal, by which body, and what exactly was stated? The official records can be retrieved on a publication-by-publication basis, so that the text cited is the text as published.

It is also useful for comparing what has actually been granted planning permission across different municipalities. With 4.6 million records, the municipal gazette is the largest collection in BesluitBron.

What it is not for

As for the process leading up to the decision: the council documents, the committee deliberations and the motions can be found at Open Raadsinformatie or OpenBesluitvorming. And as for decisions that have not been published, these are always missing from this site.

Current situation, as of August 2026

One to two days, and this varies depending on the official gazette. As of 16 August 2026: the Government Gazette was current up to 15 August; the Municipal Gazette, the Official Gazette, parliamentary documents and most other gazettes were current up to 14 August; the proceedings were current up to 13 August; and the Treaty Gazette was current up to 10 August.

The tool data_freshness provides this figure in real time for each issue. Anyone wishing to make a ruling on the completeness of a recent period can therefore check for themselves rather than relying on this date.