The Minister for Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environ-ment (VROM) informs the Dutch Parliament every year on the quality of the drinking water in the Netherlands. The drinking water quality has been overviewed in this report for a ten-year period, from1992 to 2002. From the digital data sent yearly from the Dutch Water Supply Companies to the Inspectorate of the VROM Ministry, drinking water has, in general, been found to be of fairly good quality. For almost all the quality parameters compliance was found to be over 99.5 percent, making non-compliance usually incidental. For the parameters,iron and manganese, occurring in the drinking water of the distribution networks, the slight decreases in percentages of non-compliance were found due to poor maintenance of the networks, although there are still a few production sites showing non-compliance for one or more parameters (manganese, pH) every year. Yearly, 4 to 7 different pesticides are found in drinking water on an incidental basis, bentazon being the most frequently detected. Although the drinking-water quality is fairly high, monitoring the whole drinking-water production chain from 'source to tap' is very important for production of safe drinking water.