Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

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; Eurostat also devised a hierarchy for the 10 countries which joind 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 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 with the ISO 3166 standard, as well as the FIPS standard of the United States.

Levels

There are three levels of NUTS defined, with two levels of local administrative units (LAUs) below that. 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.

• DE000: Germany
  • DE700: Hesse - The Bundesland as the top level subdivision of Germany
    • DE710: Darmstadt region - Regierungsbezirk as second level
      • DE71E: Wetteraukreis - Kreis as the third level
• AA: Asia
  • AA25: Thailand
• US16: Kansas