Legislation
CVDR (lokale regelgeving)
Lokaleregelgeving.overheid.nl holds the consolidated texts of the by-laws, policy rules and other decisions of Dutch municipalities, provinces, water authorities and joint arrangements. The legal basis is article 19 of the Publication Act: administrative bodies must keep the texts of promulgated generally binding rules, policy rules and joint arrangements available to everyone free of charge in consolidated form, through a designated electronic medium. The database is run by KOOP under the responsibility of the Ministry of the Interior; on 15 September 2026 it contained 103,424 rules.
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Availability depends on your organisation’s configuration and access rights.
What this source does not give you
The consolidated text here is a service, not the promulgation: that took place in the municipal, provincial or water authority journal, and entry into force depends on it. Overheid.nl states that it is responsible only for keeping the rules accessible; for the question of what the correct text is, the site refers you to the authority that adopted the rule.
Legal domains for which LEO consults this source
Dutch legal domains; each link opens the domain page on leo.prudai.com.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I rely in proceedings on the text of a by-law as it appears here?
- As a working text yes, as the source of validity not without more. Article 8 of the Publication Act provides that a generally binding rule does not enter into force before it has been promulgated in the prescribed manner, and for municipal, provincial and water authority rules that means publication in the body's own journal. The consolidated text on lokaleregelgeving.overheid.nl implements a different obligation, that of article 19: keeping the consolidated version available. If the dispute turns on the exact wording or on the date an amendment took effect, the municipal journal is the source and the consolidated text is the aid that points you to it.
- Why is local legislation not simply on wetten.overheid.nl?
- Because these are two different collections with different data owners. Wetten.overheid.nl holds the national legislation database; the local database holds the rules of decentralised authorities, which supply them themselves. Municipalities, provinces and water authorities are obliged to make their rules available through Overheid.nl, but remain the owners of the content. The practical consequence: a search on wetten.overheid.nl finds no by-law at all, and a search in the local database finds no statute at all — for questions touching both layers, such as planning and environmental law, you have to look in both.
- Can I find out what a by-law looked like last year?
- Yes, and that is secured by law. Article 19(3) of the Publication Act provides that a consolidated text, once made available, remains available even after the rule has been amended or repealed. The database therefore keeps successive versions with their periods of validity, which is what you need as soon as you must assess conduct under the law as it stood at the time. Always check the stated date of entry into force and the promulgation reference shown with the version; those two data points are what make a version usable as support.
- Who is responsible if the text here is wrong?
- The authority that adopted the rule. The site says so itself: Overheid.nl is responsible only for keeping the rules accessible, and for information about the correct text or the content you must contact the authority that adopted it. The Overheid.nl colophon repeats the message more generally: the information offered is never entirely free of defects, and if the information is essential to you, you should verify it with the responsible body. Where a decision or an advice rests on the text, that is not a formality but a verification step.
- How do I find every rule that applies at one address?
- Through the postcode search. That entry point returns the rules of every organisation that covers the postcode — municipality, province, water authority and regional joint bodies at once. This is precisely the step most often skipped in local research: a site rarely falls under a single layer of government, and it is the water authority regulation or a joint arrangement that gets overlooked. The full-text search additionally supports phrases in quotation marks and the wildcards * and ?, and lets you choose between searching the title and searching the text.