Government & open data
open.overheid.nl
open.overheid.nl is the central search portal for government information that has been proactively disclosed. KOOP — part of Logius since 1 January 2023 — builds and operates it on behalf of the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations. Administrative bodies deliver through the Woo index, a manual upload portal, the Woo harvester that crawls decentralised websites, or a generic delivery API; everything that arrives becomes findable and searchable here. Since 28 April 2026 it is also where most central-government parliamentary papers and freedom-of-information requests land.
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Availability depends on your organisation’s configuration and access rights.
What this source does not give you
The portal is not complete and does not claim to be: the Dutch Open Government Act lists seventeen information categories that become mandatory in four tranches, and only tranche 1 is in force (since 1 November 2024, covering five categories). Freedom-of-information requests and decisions become mandatory for central government only at tranche 2 and for regional and local government only at tranche 3 — so what you find here from municipalities is largely supplied voluntarily, and the absence of a document proves nothing.
Frequently asked questions
- Does open.overheid.nl hold everything the government discloses?
- No. The Open Government Act contains seventeen information categories that administrative bodies must disclose on their own initiative, phased in over four tranches. Tranche 1 has applied since 1 November 2024 and covers five categories: laws and generally binding regulations, other decisions of general application, parliamentary meeting documents, organisation and working methods, and contact details. Tranches 2 to 4 have yet to enter into force. On top of that, organisations may deliver voluntarily, so coverage varies per body.
- What can I filter on in the search?
- The open.overheid.nl search works with five filter dimensions: document type, theme, organisation, information category, and the period in which a document became available. Document type and information category are not the same thing: the type describes the form (a parliamentary paper, a covenant, a decision memo, a report), while the information category points to the category in article 3.3 of the Open Government Act under which the item was disclosed. For a Woo question, that second filter is usually the useful one.
- What is the Woo index and how does it relate to this portal?
- The Woo index is a per-organisation overview of where a given administrative body publishes its Woo documents, together with general address and contact details, an organisational description, and the contact details for submitting a request and for the Woo contact person or team. It is part of the Register of Government Organisations (ROO) and doubles as one of the delivery methods for open.overheid.nl. If you are looking for an organisation rather than a document, that is where you start.
- Does this portal replace filing a Woo request?
- No. open.overheid.nl surfaces information that has already been proactively disclosed. Documents that do not yet fall under an information category in force, or that a body has not supplied voluntarily, are simply absent — for those, a request to the body concerned remains the route. The portal is still a sensible first step: filing a request for something already published wastes time on both sides.
- Where does open.overheid.nl end and puc.overheid.nl begin?
- open.overheid.nl is about disclosure: documents an administrative body has released, with the Open Government Act as the basis and the date of availability as the organising principle. puc.overheid.nl is about operative implementation policy: policy rules, work instructions and handbooks from implementing, supervisory and enforcement bodies, each version carrying a validity date. A social-insurance-bank policy rule may surface on both portals, but only on PUC can you establish which version applied on the day a decision was taken.