In Brabant, population growth in 2025 was very modest. This is evident from provisional annual figures published by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) on Monday. Fewer new Dutch residents arrived throughout the Netherlands than a year earlier. The main cause: decreased migration from abroad.
In December 2025, the Netherlands had a population of 18,131,238 to be precise. That is 87,211 more than a year earlier. The population is therefore growing less rapidly than in previous years. This is mainly because more people died than were born and fewer people entered the Netherlands.
This is also the case in Brabant. This province welcomed 12,706 new residents this year. About as much as the number of inhabitants of a place like Sint-Oedenrode.
Less immigration
“You’re not doing anything wrong!” Tanja Traag, researcher at CBS, laughs heartily at the question of what we are doing wrong in Brabant because hardly any new Brabant residents have arrived. “In the Netherlands we are dealing with a natural decline of approximately 7,500 people per year. This means that more people die than are born.”
Population growth therefore comes from the difference in migration. More people come to the Netherlands than leave. But the number of people coming to the Netherlands is also declining. Hence, population growth is decreasing. “You should mainly think of migrant workers who temporarily live and work in the Netherlands.”
Brabant champion
Boekel and Goirle are in the national top ten of the fastest growing municipalities in the Netherlands. In both places this is because a number of new construction projects were completed in 2025. Because these are municipalities with few inhabitants, population growth increases relatively quickly when new houses are built.
Breda is one of the few large Dutch cities that grew faster than the national average. The city gained a relatively large number of new residents, mainly through relocations from other places in the country.
Just a quarter of a million
Eindhoven proudly welcomed its 250,000th resident in October, but growth over the entire year was disappointing. The City of Light gained less than a thousand (863) residents. Significantly less than the 3,000 new residents that the city was allowed to register in the population register on average in recent years. Traag cannot say exactly what this is due to, but she does see a trend that she also sees in the Randstad. “People are moving away from the city to slightly quieter municipalities with facilities that better suit family life, for example.”
Tilburg did even worse. The city has seen population growth decline for years. In 2022, more than 3,200 Tilburg residents would join us. In 2025, that number will have fallen to 400 in the provisional figures. This is because more people are moving from Tilburg to other municipalities and migration from abroad is decreasing. In 2022, almost 3,000 people came to Tilburg from abroad, compared to less than a thousand last year.
Both Tilburg and Eindhoven expect significant population growth in the coming years due to all the new construction projects that have already started or are still being developed in both cities.
Influence of asylum seekers’ center
Gilze-Rijen and Cranendonck stand out in the latest CBS figures because the shrinkage was the largest there. In Gilze-Rijen the population shrank by 170 people. In Cranendonck even with 640.
CBS is looking for the statement in the presence of an asylum seekers’ center in both municipalities. In Cranendonk, almost 11,500 more people were added in 2024 due to foreign migration. In 2025, there were fewer than 7,000. A significant decrease. For comparison; Tilburg received just over 4,200 migrants from abroad in 2025.
