Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics
The
Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) is a
geocode standard for referencing the administrative division of
countries for statistical purposes. The standard was developed by the
European Union, and thus only covers the member states of the EU in detail (see also:
Regions of the European Union);
Eurostat also devised a hierarchy for the 10 countries which joined the EU in
2004, but these are subject to minor changes. The NUTS divisions do not necessarily correspond to administrative divisions within the country. The
acronym is derived from the
French name for the scheme,
nomenclature des unités territoriales statistiques.
A NUTS code begins with a two letter code referencing the country, which are identical with the
ISO 3166-1 codes (except
UK instead of
GB for the
United Kingdom). The subdivision of countries is then referred with one number, covering the same entities as the
ISO 3166-2 standard. A second or third subdivision level is referred with another number each. Each numbering starts with 1 as 0 is used for the upper level. In case it has more than 9 entities capital letters are used to continue the numbering.
Additionally to the full three levels for the European Union countries all countries have a NUTS code with a two letter code for a continent and two numbers for the country, and for the USA, Canada and Australia the states and provinces are numbered separately.
There are some anomalies: for example,
Gibraltar is listed as being outside the EU with the code EO21; while
French Guiana is listed twice, once in
France as FR930 and once in
South America as AS13.
NUTS is thus in some extent similar to the
ISO 3166 standard, as well as the
FIPS standard of the United States.
There are three levels of NUTS defined, with two levels of
local administrative units (LAUs) below that, historically called NUTS levels 4 and 5 and sometimes still described as such. Note that not all countries have every level of division. Luxembourg, for example, has only LAUs; the three NUTS divisions each correspond to the entire country itself.
*DE:
Germany**DE7:
Hesse - The
Bundesland as the top level subdivision of
Germany***DE71:
Darmstadt region -
Regierungsbezirk as second level
****DE71E:
Wetteraukreis -
Kreis as the third level
*AA:
Asia**AA25:
Thailand*US16:
Kansas*
ISO 3166*
ISO 3166-1*
ISO 3166-2*
List of FIPS region codes*
Correspondence between the NUTS levels and the national administrative units — Eurostat
*
NUTS Statistical Regions of Europe — Eurostat
*
Hierarchical list of the NUTS (EU-15) — Eurostat
*
Hierarchy in EFTA, Accession and Candidate countries — Eurostat
*
List of NUTS codes (World Wide) — European Union
