Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics or NUTS is a geocodestandard for referencing the subdivisions of countries for statistical purposes. The standard, adopted in 2003, is developed and regulated by the European Union, and thus only covers the member states of the EU in detail. The Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics is instrumental in the European Union's Structural Funds and Cohesion Fund delivery mechanisms and for locating the area where goods and services subject to European public procurement legislation are to be delivered. For each EU member country, a hierarchy of three NUTS levels is established by Eurostat in agreement with each member state; the subdivisions in some levels do not necessarily correspond to administrative divisions within the country. A NUTS code begins with a two-letter code referencing the country, as abbreviated in the European Union's Interinstitutional Style Guide. The subdivision of the country is then referred to with one number. A second or third subdivision level is referred to with another number each. Each numbering starts with 1, as 0 is used for the upper level. Where the subdivision has more than nine entities, capital letters are used to continue the numbering. Below the three NUTS levels are local administrative units. A similar statistical system is defined for the candidate countries and members of the European Free Trade Association, but they are not part of NUTS governed by the regulations. The current NUTS classification, dated 21 November 2016 and effective from 1 January 2018, lists 92 regions at NUTS 1, 244 regions at NUTS 2, 1215 regions at NUTS 3 level, and 99,387 local administrative units.
National structures
Not all countries have every level of division, depending on their size. For example, Luxembourg and Cyprus only have LAUs; the three NUTS divisions each correspond to the entire country itself.
NUTS regions are generally based on existing national administrative subdivisions. In countries where only one or two regional subdivisions exist, or where the population of existing subdivisions is too small or too large, a second and/or third level is created. This may be on the first level, on the second and/or third level. In countries with small populations, where the entire country would be placed on the NUTS 2 or even NUTS 3 level, the regions at levels 1, 2 and 3 are identical to each other, but are coded with the appropriate length codes levels 1, 2 and 3. The NUTS system favors existing administrative units, with one or more assigned to each NUTS level. Specific guidelines are based in population, leaving little or no role for other types of variables such as area, distance, topography, levels of jurisdiction or history, which can only be considered in types of special cases. From the NUTS Regulation, the average population size of the regions in the respective level shall lie within the following thresholds:
Level
Minimum
Maximum
NUTS 1
3 million
7 million
NUTS 2
800,000
3 million
NUTS 3
150,000
800,000
For non-administrative units, deviations from these population marks exist for particular geographical, socio-economic, historical, cultural or environmental circumstances, especially for islands and outermost regions.
