Hi everyone,

Today we went live with a new annotation: NUTS code. For any geocoding result in the European Union we now return NUTS levels 0-3.

NUTS codes (short for Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) are hierarchical codes used by the EU for statistical analysis of subdivisons of countries. Eurostat, the agency responsible for the NUTS classifications, defines the levels as:

0. country

1. major socioeconomic regions

2. basic regions for the application of regional policies

3. small regions for specific diagnoses

This map (a screenshot taken from the Eurostat website) shows NUTS2 regions across Europe. "Map of Europe showing NUTS2 regions"

Here is an example (in JSON format) of the NUTS annotations values in a geocoding request for OpenCage HQ in Hanover, Germany:

"NUTS": {
  "NUTS0": {
    "code": "DE"
  },
  "NUTS1": {
    "code": "DE9"
  },
  "NUTS2": {
    "code": "DE92"
  },
  "NUTS3": {
    "code": "DE929"
  }
},

For now we have NUTS codes only EU member states. There are also NUTS codes for EU candidate countries, former members (the UK), and EFTA countries, but we thought we would get started with the EU 27 and gather feedback. So please let us know what you think.

As you would hope and expect, all of this is explained in the relevant section of the API documentation, and you can dive deeper into NUTS on the Eurostat site or Wikipedia (link above).

NUTS codes are just one of several statistical codes we return. UN M49 codes are country level codes and statistical groupings created by the United Nations. For US territories we provide FIPS codes. Increasingly Wikidata ids are being used to refer to locations, as well. Since last summer we also provide ISO 3166-2 codes as a way to reference country sub-levels.

We hope all of these codes help make the lives of researchers and developers easier by making it simpler to cross-reference datasets.

One final note, if you don’t need the information in the annotations we recommend you turn them off (by adding no_annotations=1 to your API request) so we can do less work and get the API response back to you a bit more quickly.

Happy geocoding from the OpenCage team here in NUTS3: DE929,

Ed