It exists, but the vast majority of government services dont use it (i.e. taxes are just done through belastingdienst.nl).

Yes, which I think is also very common, but what Wikipedia was referring to is that there's no official second-level domain for Government, unlike say gov.br or gov.uk).

Gov.nl is just a domain owned by the Dutch Government, like gov.ie or belgium.be.

Ah. Just a blatant inaccuracy on wikipedia I take it. That does make a bit more sense.

Yep. gov.nl is in the PSL[1] and there are plenty of used subdomains (e.g. https://business.gov.nl/)

[1] https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat

As far as I can tell .gov.nl is only used for pages aimed at i.e. expats and businesses. Most services dutch people use simply have a .nl page like the digital id or filing taxes.

This makes sense because gov is anglocentric and would make the URLs sound weird in non-English countries.

There’s no reason they couldn’t have picked a different second-level suffix. Spanish-speaking countries use e.g. .gob.mx, France uses .gouv.fr.

And overheid.nl is their government site for that reason.