Two homes for sale, both just listed. One is in Amsterdam: 68 square metres, asking price half a million. The other in Kerkrade: 140 square metres, two storeys, private garden, for less than half the price. The same market, the same country, but you buy something completely different.
On Buurtje.nl we keep track of the current supply of homes for sale. For 87 places with enough listings, we looked at the median size of homes on the market and what you pay per square metre. The result is a map of the Netherlands where space and price run exactly opposite: where homes are smallest, the square metre is most expensive.
One caveat beforehand
These figures are about what is for sale, not about how the Dutch live on average. A city with many small apartments for sale may also be full of spacious family homes that simply are not on the market. The median you see below is therefore the median of the supply. And these are asking prices, not what is ultimately paid at the notary.
Amsterdam is in a league of its own
The smallest homes for sale in the Netherlands are in Amsterdam. The median home in the supply there is 70 square metres. For comparison: in almost every other major city, that median is around 84 to 95 square metres, and in many smaller municipalities above 120.
It is no small difference. Nearly one in five Amsterdam homes for sale is smaller than 50 square metres. In Rotterdam and The Hague, that is about one in fifteen. Amsterdam, in short, sells a different product: compact apartments instead of single-family homes.
And it costs the most. The median price per square metre in Amsterdam is €8,229. That is almost double that of Rotterdam (€4,532) and more than double that of Groningen (€3,543). So you buy the least space at the highest price per metre. The median asking price of an Amsterdam home thus comes to €530,000 for 70 square metres.
The smallest ten
The places with the smallest median home for sale, each with the corresponding price per square metre:
- Amsterdam: 70 m², €8,229/m².
- Groningen: 83 m², €3,543/m².
- Rotterdam: 84 m², €4,532/m².
- Utrecht: 84 m², €5,853/m².
- Leiden: 84 m², €5,372/m².
- The Hague: 87 m², €4,758/m².
- Haarlem: 91 m², €5,860/m².
- Delft: 93 m², €4,958/m².
- Schiedam: 94 m², €3,689/m².
- Zaandam: 96 m², €4,348/m².
These are almost all student cities and places in the Randstad. Groningen stands out: homes as small as in the Randstad, but for less than half the Amsterdam price per square metre. So a city full of small apartments does not have to be expensive. It depends on where in the country you are.
Where you get the most space
At the other end of the scale are places where the median home for sale is almost twice as large as in Amsterdam, for a fraction of the price per square metre:
- Kerkrade: 138 m², €2,088/m².
- Lelystad: 135 m², €3,360/m².
- Best: 128 m², €3,650/m².
- Veldhoven: 128 m², €4,387/m².
- Landgraaf: 127 m², €2,460/m².
- Houten: 124 m², €4,436/m².
Kerkrade is in every way the opposite of Amsterdam: almost twice as much space, for a quarter of the price per square metre. For the money of that one Amsterdam 70-square-metre home, you can buy over two complete single-family homes here.
Space and price run opposite
That is the pattern that runs through all the figures. Where homes are small, the square metre is expensive. Where they are spacious, the square metre is cheap. The square metre in the Netherlands does not have one price, but is a trade-off: you pay for the location, not for the space. In Amsterdam you mainly buy a postcode, and the home is whatever happens to fit around it.
That also explains why "buying a house" has such different meanings in the Netherlands. In one city it is an apartment where you can barely park your bike, in another it is a terraced house with a garden and shed, for the same amount.
What use is this to you?
If you are flexible about where you live, this is where the biggest gain in the entire housing market lies. Not in negotiating a few thousand euros, but in the choice of location. An hour's commute quickly makes the difference between 70 and 130 square metres, with the same monthly costs.
And if you are tied to a specific city: then know what you are getting into. In Amsterdam, living small is not a stepping stone but the norm of the supply. The question is not whether you will live small, but how small.
Curious how big and how expensive the homes are in your city? At buurtje.nl/koopwoningen you can view the current supply per place and neighbourhood.
Source: own data Buurtje.nl, private home supply (size 15-300 m², price €50,000-€2,000,000), excluding housing associations and room rentals, online as of May 2026. Only places with at least 300 homes in the supply were included. The same home listed on multiple websites counts once. All sizes and prices per square metre are medians of asking prices, not transaction prices, and may therefore differ from what is ultimately paid.
