Regions of Denmark

The five regions of Denmark were created as administrative entities at a level above the municipalities and below the central government in the public sector as part of the 2007 Danish Municipal Reform, when the 13 counties were abolished. At the same time, the number of municipalities was cut from 270 to 98. The reform was approved and made into a law by the lawmakers in the Folketing 26 June 2005 with elections to the 98 municipalities and 5 regions being held Tuesday 15 November 2005.
Each of the five regions is governed by a popularly elected regional council with 41 members, from whom the regional chairperson is chosen. This is 205 members in total. The number of regions will be reduced to four from 1 January 2027. The number of council members elected will change to between 25 and 47 in the 2025 Danish local elections for a total of 134 in the four regional councils that will then be elected.
The main responsibility of the regions is healthcare. Lesser powers of the regions include public transport, environmental planning, soil pollution management and some coordination of secondary education.
In contrast to the former counties, the regions do not have municipal powers. Regions cannot levy taxes, but are financed partly by block grants from the central government and partly by taxes collected by their constituent municipalities. Regions cannot decide their budgets independently, but must use the block grant for the purposes that are specified by the central government. In other words, the regional powers were dramatically reduced in favor of the local level. As they are not municipalities, regions are not allowed to have coats of arms, but they do have modern logos.
The small archipelago of Ertholmene to the northeast of Bornholm is not part of any region or municipality. Its inhabitants do not pay municipal taxes, nor did they pay the central government's health care contribution tax or the tax levied by counties prior to 2007.
The representative organisation Danske Regioner was set up on 23 March 2006. It is an advocacy and lobbying organisation speaking on behalf of all of the regions, including negotiating labour contracts, etc. The organization also maintains an office in Brussels. As a central representation of the Danish healthcare system, it has rather large, although unofficial, powers. Its equivalent before 2006 was Amtsrådsforeningen, the organisation of county representations, which had a comparatively larger power.
The government is currently working on merging the Zealand Region and Capital Region into one region named Eastern Denmark from 1 January 2027. The council in the merged region will have 47 members elected in the 2025 Danish local elections. They will be seated in the present-day Region Sjælland seat Sorø. The law setting up the new region has been approved by the lawmakers of the national parliament the Folketing, and signed by the head of state 20 June 2025.

List of regions

Population numbers in this table will not be updated. For 1 January population every year, see below Regions of Denmark#Population growth.

Danish name

Self-appellation in English^a

Seat of administration

Chairman

Population^b

Total area^b

Pop. density

Former counties

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Names in English

Like their geographical areas, the names of several regions are neologisms. The term Syddanmark was known before the reform, but not in the present meaning. It was sometimes used to refer to Denmark proper as opposed to the North Atlantic parts of the Danish Realm, the Faroe Islands and Greenland. The term Midtjylland was, and in common use still is, used to describe the interior centre of Jutland, but never the coastal areas of the peninsula.
The Regions of North Jutland and Central Jutland have chosen to market themselves internationally under the names of North Denmark Region and Central Denmark Region, respectively, although in Denmark these geographical terms have no traditional use and may be confusing.
The government most often uses the Danish names in English-language publications or directly translated English names.
Strictly speaking, there is no authority defining the correct English names since the official names are stipulated in a law existing only in a Danish version.

Population growth

Note: Numbers for the year 2006 are pro forma to be a reference, an example, to compare regions and changes in population numbers when the economy was expanding, growing, as opposed to when it was contracting.

Functions

Health sector, including hospitals, psychiatry and health insurance, general practitioners and specialists.
Health insurance for basic dental care.
Regional development concerning nature and the environment, private sector economy, tourism, employment, education, and culture, outlying areas and rural area development. Administrative assistance for private sector growth fora.
Ground pollution surveillance and cleanup.
Raw material mapping and planning. Permission for extraction, i.e. gravel pits.
Social and educational institutions for people with special needs.
Public transportation.

The most important area of responsibility for the new regions is the public health service, accounting for 90% of the regions' expenditure. They are also responsible for employment policies and public mass transit. However, in eastern Denmark the regions and 45 out of 46 municipalities share one employment region and transit is handled by a single transport agency, Movia.
Bornholm Regional Municipality because of its remote location in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and the westernmost part of Poland is its own employment region and is 100% owner of its own public mass transit agency, BAT, which was Bornholms Amts Trafikselskab until the island's county was abolished on 1 January 2003. Bornholm also performs other tasks that are normally carried out by the regions in the rest of Denmark – thus the name Bornholm Regional Municipality: Bornholm in some respects forms a region by itself. From 1 January 2016 Ærø Municipality, created 1 January 2006 as part of the municipal reform, is responsible for public mass transit in the municipality. From 1 January 2018 Fanø Municipality will be the sole provider of public mass transit on the island of Fanø taking over the responsibilities from the Region of Southern Denmark.

Healthcare reforms and centralization

The regions own all public hospitals in their areas and also control the primary care sector through contracts with general physicians and specialists. The name of the region is often used on hospitals' letterheads and on doctors' and nurses' white coats.
Four of the regions have a university hospital, corresponding with the four medical faculties of Denmark. The Region Zealand lacks a medical faculty but has in 2016 renamed its hospitals in Roskilde and Køge, close to Copenhagen, as university hospitals and will collaborate with the medical faculty of the University of Copenhagen.
The administrative reform of 1 January 2007 was in many respects also a centralisation of the healthcare system. While the former counties controlled hospitals relatively independently, healthcare policy is now decided by the government, while regions administer it. Some local hospitals have been closed or downgraded. New, large and highly specialised hospitals have been built including Aarhus University Hospital and Psychiatric Hospital Slagelse. Projects during or awaiting construction are the new Aalborg University Hospital, Odense University Hospital, North Zealand Hospital at Hillerød serving the northern Copenhagen area, the regional Gødstrup Hospital and Aabenraa Hospital, and large extensions of the Zealand University Hospital in Køge, Herlev Hospital, Bispebjerg Hospital and Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen and the regional South Jutland Hospital in Sønderborg.
The projects, in Denmark known as 'super hospitals', were intended to increase the quality of care and reduce costs, but have almost uniformly experienced large-scale planning problems including breach of budgets, delays, interior climate problems, unsatisfactory design and last-minute cost cuts such as removing kitchens, decreasing the bed capacity or removing amenities for patients. As a result of the centralisation, Denmark will decrease its hospitals with emergency care from 40 in 2007 to 21 in 2020. The changes have been criticised by residents in areas far from emergency hospitals. To compensate, some of the regions offer paramedic helicopter response in addition to ambulances. In addition, since 1999 the government has obliged Danish hospitals to increase their productivity by 2% per year for the same budget, in the expectation of possible benefits from technical progress, but often leading to cutbacks in services. A growth in bureaucracy has generally been observed by doctors and employees. In the Capital Region and Zealand Region, a new electronic health record system developed by Epic Systems has been described as a major scandal, causing unresponsive IT systems, wrong prescriptions, more time-consumption and a lack of overview. Doctors and other employees have demanded the withdrawal of the system, but the regions insist that it will remain in place and errors be corrected.
Regions are responsible for providing primary care to all citizens. This is carried out through contracts with general practitioners who for the most part own their clinics and provide treatment free-of-charge for the public, according to specifications laid down by the region. According to doctors, the burden of documentation and administration has increased, and the amount of young doctors wishing a career as general practitioners has diminished. Since many areas have been affected by physician shortage, the regions have been compelled to open region-owned clinics to fill the gaps.