Postcodes and Nuts (Nomenclature of Territorial Units For Statistics)

All regional statistics at Eurostat refer to NUTS. However, some data collections use postcodes to reference the geographic location. Therefore, Eurostat has established a link between postcodes and NUTS level 3 codes in order to exploit information which originally is coded only by postcodes.

Various projects in Eurostat and other services of the Commission as well as the European Investment Bank have expressed their need for a link between postcodes and NUTS codes. The most important application at Eurostat is in transport statistics where the information is used to identify the flows of goods transport on roads. Another application is to geo-code address registers with the regional NUTS codes because postcodes are generally available as part of the address.

The TERCET NUTS-postal codes matching tables contain a lookup-list of European postal codes and their corresponding NUTS codes for the NUTS versions 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2021. There are matching tables for most of the EU, Candidate, EFTA and the United Kingdom. Eurostat has applied a number of quality assurance measures to ensure the best possible quality of the data including formatting checks, checks for completeness of postal codes and checks for spatial accuracy of the geocoding.

Additional tables containing distance matrixes for different modes of transport are provided.

Nevertheless, due to the very diverse and complex situation in Europe for postal codes data we cannot guarantee that all postal codes are included and have been correctly matched. Should you detect any errors, we would be grateful if you could notify them to us at ESTAT-USER-SUPPORT@ec.europa.eu. The matching tables have been created with data and tools that allow for their free and public distribution for statistical and other non-commercial purposes.

More information on quality assurance and data sources can be found in the methodological notes.

KNOWN ISSUES FOR NUTS (as of 15/07/2020) * Malta has only higher level Postal districts Data for CY has gaps for NUTS 2021, GISCO is working on improving the coverage. Data for Albania and Montenegro are missing, GISCO is looking into improving the coverage.