Legislation
Officiële Bekendmakingen
Officielebekendmakingen.nl is the channel through which Dutch government bodies formally promulgate their decisions. The Dutch Publication Act assigns publication of the Bulletin of Acts (Staatsblad) and the Government Gazette (Staatscourant) to the government — responsibility for the Staatsblad lies with the Minister of Justice and Security, for the Staatscourant with the Minister of the Interior — and obliges provinces, municipalities, water authorities and joint arrangements to publish their own electronic official journal. Parliamentary documents are held here as well. The site is run by KOOP, the Dutch government's knowledge and operations centre for official publications.
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What this source does not give you
The formal promulgation is the PDF file offered here, and only for journals issued after 1 July 2009; for older publications only the paper journals have formal status and the electronic versions are provided as a service. This is also a publication channel, not a statute book: the consolidated, currently applicable text of a rule is found on wetten.overheid.nl or, for decentralised rules, in the local legislation database.
Frequently asked questions
- Which file on this site is actually the official promulgation?
- The PDF, not the web page around it. The site's own disclaimer puts it this way: the PDF files offered of the Staatsblad, Staatscourant, Tractatenblad, provincial journal, municipal journal, water authority journal and joint arrangement journal constitute the formal promulgations within the meaning of the Publication Act and the Treaties (Approval and Publication) Act, insofar as they were issued after 1 July 2009. For publications from before that date, only the journals issued in paper form have formal status. So if you need the text of a promulgation as evidence, keep the PDF with its publication number, not a screenshot of the HTML rendering.
- What happens if a rule has not been promulgated?
- Then it does not enter into force. Article 8 of the Publication Act is unequivocal: a generally binding rule does not enter into force before it has been promulgated in the prescribed manner. What that manner is follows from the Act itself: statutes, orders in council and other royal decrees containing generally binding rules are promulgated in the Staatsblad; ministerial regulations and other central-government rules in the Staatscourant; decentralised rules in the province's, municipality's, water authority's or joint arrangement's own journal. The issue date of that journal is therefore a hard, verifiable question of fact in any dispute about whether a rule applies.
- Which journals are held here and who publishes them?
- At central-government level the Staatsblad and the Staatscourant, which under article 1 of the Publication Act are issued by the government and distributed electronically in a generally accessible manner, plus the Tractatenblad for treaties. At decentralised level: the provincial journal (issued by the provincial executive), the municipal journal (the municipal executive), the water authority journal (the water authority's executive board), the promulgation journal of Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba, and the joint arrangement journal. The site also holds parliamentary documents, including bills, explanatory memoranda and proceedings.
- Do promulgations stay available, and does consulting them cost money?
- Article 3 of the Publication Act settles both points: official journals issued electronically remain available electronically in a generally accessible manner after issue, and no charge is made for access to those journals. So there is no subscription barrier and no retention period after which an issue disappears. That is not the same as a guarantee that a web address will not change: alongside the link, record the publication number as well, for example the Staatsblad or Staatscourant number with its year.
- How much is published here on an ordinary day?
- More than a person can keep up with, and the centre of gravity is local. On Tuesday 15 September 2026 the site listed 2,246 publications for that single day: 1,970 in municipal journals, 119 in the Staatscourant, 82 in water authority journals, 72 in provincial journals, 2 in joint arrangement journals and 1 in the Tractatenblad; the Staatsblad stood at zero that day. The site also has a separate category for urgent publications. For anyone following a specific file, the subscription and alerting function is therefore more practical than searching by hand from time to time.