.png)
SummaryThe Netherlands is the country where the technical route is open and the legal route is closed. The price data exists, it is structured, it covers the whole market, and it belongs to a private company whose licence terms make redistribution expensive and conditional. On top of that, the conversion factor that most summaries use to get from the Dutch consumer price to the wholesale level lost its legal basis in 2012 and has not had one since.
The G-Standaard is the national pharmaceutical database, maintained by a private company that belongs to the Dutch pharmacists' association. It carries the prices, the pack structure and the identifiers that the Dutch market actually works with. It is licence bound.
The maximum prices under the medicine prices act, the Wgp, are something different: a legal ceiling calculated by the state from the prices of four reference countries. The Wgp answers what a product may cost. The G-Standaard answers what it does cost, per pack, with a national code.
Mixing the two is the most common conceptual error in Dutch price work. A maximum price is a policy instrument and it is not a transaction level price.
The Dutch medicines information bank publishes master data for authorised products. We downloaded that file on 5 September 2026 at 16,313,856 bytes, HTTP 200.
It contains neither prices nor pack sizes.
That is the whole story of the free route in the Netherlands. Identification is open, the price column is not. The same pattern appears in Germany and in Austria, and it is the defining shape of European pharmaceutical data: the identity layer is free, the price layer is sold.
The terms are unusually explicit, which is helpful, and unusually demanding.
As a pure end user, redistribution is prohibited, with an immediately payable penalty of 5,000 euro per breach or per week that a breach continues, plus an audit right that extends to inspection of the accounts.
As an intermediary, redistribution is permitted, including after your own processing, under four conditions:
The fourth condition is the commercially serious one. A supplier that can order you to cut off a named customer holds a veto over your own client relationships.
Published conditions for 2026: a test file at 704 euro, the flexible G-Standaard product at 5,232 euro per year, a custom list at 750 to 1,250 euro once plus 1,500 to 4,000 euro monthly. All amounts exclude VAT and are indexed annually. The full dataset and the price component are available on request only, there is no scale by number of end customers, and the licensor reserves a unilateral and unlimited right to increase prices.
The intermediary price is not published, which makes it a blank cheque in any business case that depends on it.
The structural point worth noting: the licensor is a subsidiary of the national pharmacists' association. It is simultaneously an interest bound party and the gatekeeper for an access that cannot be substituted. The combination of a customer list disclosure right and a blocking right against individual customers sits awkwardly with a self description as a neutral body.
For reimbursed products the usual back calculation from the Dutch consumer price runs in two steps: remove VAT at 9 percent, then remove a distributor margin of 6.5 percent.
The VAT rate is confirmed. The 6.5 percent is not.
The uniform pharmacy tariffs in the Netherlands were abolished on 1 January 2012, and with them the legal basis of the deduction. The rule as it circulates today rests on a price commission regulation of a third country, used as an estimate, rather than on Dutch law. Anyone implementing it is applying a foreign administrative factor to Dutch prices and calling the result a wholesale price.
There is a second structural point that makes the Dutch case less painful than it sounds. The pharmacy margin in the Netherlands is realised through fixed fees that are not part of the published price. The price excluding tax therefore already corresponds to the wholesale level, which means the questionable 6.5 percent step is the only one in dispute.
Our recommendation is to keep the step out of the pipeline until it has a Dutch legal basis, and to publish the price excluding tax as the wholesale level with a note, rather than to publish a manufacturer level figure built on an unverifiable factor.
A baseline description we inherited claims that the Dutch source carries only unit prices, so that the pack size has to be taken from a European authority database. That is wrong. Each item view shows the price per unit and the price per pack side by side. The detour through an external database is unnecessary, and dropping it removes a dependency on a source that is not public anyway.
| Level | Published in the Netherlands | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Manufacturer price | No | Only derivable, and the factor is disputed |
| Wholesale level | Effectively yes, as the price excluding tax | Because the pharmacy fee sits outside the price |
| Consumer price | Yes, in the licensed database | Includes VAT at 9 percent |
| Maximum price | Yes, calculated by the state | A ceiling from four reference countries, not a market price |
| Pack size | Yes, next to the unit price | Available with the licence |
Reading that table from the bottom up is the fastest way to see why the Netherlands is easy to describe and hard to buy. Four of the five rows exist. The one that a European comparison most often wants, the manufacturer level, is the one the country does not publish.
The Dutch maximum price calculation reads Belgium, France, Norway and the United Kingdom. Those four publish at different levels: Belgium ex-factory, France a gross consumer price, Norway pharmacy purchase prices. A basket built from them has to be normalised before it can be averaged, which is the same problem described in our general work on European price comparison, here embedded in a statutory formula.
For a manufacturer, that makes the Netherlands a country where pricing decisions in four other markets have a direct and calculable effect. For a data platform, it makes the Dutch formula a good test of whether a normalisation layer actually works.
The Netherlands is not a data problem, it is a rights problem, and the two require completely different plans. The technical route is short: identification is free, the price data is structured, the pack size is published next to the unit price. The legal route is long: a private gatekeeper, a penalty clause, an audit right, a per customer approval loop and a right to block named customers. Add to that a conversion factor without a legal basis since 2012, and the correct move is to publish the level you can defend and to start the licensing conversation early.
Related reading: European Drug Pricing Database: how cross-border prices work and Pharma pricing Germany: how the system works, plus external reference pricing in Europe and VAT on medicines in Europe.
pharmazie.com is the consolidated pharmaceutical data platform by DACON Datenbank Consulting GmbH that bundles 25+ specialist databases into a single search, exclusively for healthcare professionals. Price coverage focuses on the DACH region and a number of further EU countries, with more countries following in the coming months.
