Geo Boundaries for NUTS administrative levels 1, 2 and 3

Boundaries of the European NUTS regions (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) at levels 1, 2 and 3, as GeoJSON polygons, taken from Eurostat GISCO. If you don't know what NUTS are, see the related Wikipedia article.

Column definitions and types are in datapackage.json.

Data

There is one file for each NUTS level in the data folder. The NUTS edition (the year) is part of the file name.

In the file names, 60M is the map scale (1:60 million, the coarsest GISCO scale), RG means region polygons, and 4326 is the coordinate reference system, EPSG:4326 (longitude and latitude in degrees).

Each file is a GeoJSON FeatureCollection. Each feature is one region, as a MultiPolygon, with these properties:

The country properties (NAME_*, ISO3_CODE, SVRG_UN, CAPT and the three *_STAT flags) are repeated on every region of the country. They are the properties that GISCO publishes in these files. The build script stops with an error if the files and datapackage.json ever disagree.

Known limitations

• Use is restricted. GISCO allows these data to be used for non-commercial purposes only, and requires the credit "© EuroGeographics for the administrative boundaries" on any publication that uses them. See License.
• MOUNT_TYPE, URBN_TYPE and COAST_TYPE are null for some regions outside the EU (for example Türkiye and Serbia).
• NAME_FREN, NAME_GERM and CAPT are null for Kosovo (XK) regions.
• Some NUTS_NAME values end with a space (for example EL3). Trim them before you compare names.
• Not every country has every level. For example, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BA) has regions at levels 1 and 2 only.
• The 1:60 million scale is coarse. It suits maps of Europe, not maps of a single region or city.
• GISCO's release notes say that the boundaries of Türkiye were made using OpenStreetMap data. See License.
• The files have no crs member (the script removes it). Coordinates are always EPSG:4326.

Data sources

• Eurostat GISCO, the territorial units for statistics (NUTS) boundaries, downloaded from the GISCO distribution service: the polygons and all properties. Licence: restricted. Non-commercial use only, with a required credit (see License).
• Boundaries of Türkiye: GISCO's release notes say they were made using OpenStreetMap data. Licence: unclear for this repo (see License).

Changes made to the source data: the three GeoJSON files (NUTS levels 1, 2 and 3, scale 60M, EPSG:4326, region polygons) are downloaded from GISCO and republished with one change: the top-level crs member is removed. All features and properties are otherwise unchanged. The script checks that the properties in the files match the fields listed in datapackage.json.

Not endorsed by, or affiliated with, Eurostat, the European Commission or EuroGeographics.

Preparation

The script needs Python 3, requests and beautifulsoup4. To rebuild the files in data:

# Install libraries
pip install -r scripts/requirements.txt

# Download the latest files and update the data
python scripts/process.py

The script reads the GISCO distribution service, finds the latest NUTS edition, and downloads the level 1, 2 and 3 files (60M, EPSG:4326, region polygons). It writes them to data only if all three downloads worked, and updates the file names, paths and sizes in datapackage.json.

A GitHub workflow (.github/workflows/actions.yml) runs the script on the 1st of every month (and on pushes to main and on manual runs) and commits the files if they changed. GISCO publishes new files only now and then, so most runs change nothing.

The dataset can also be found on datahub.io.

License

The boundary data is not free for every use. GISCO's copyright information for its statistical units (which include NUTS) says:

It asks for this notice, in the legend of any map and in the introductory page of any publication that uses the data:

It also says: "If you intend to use the data commercially, please contact EuroGeographics for information about their licence agreements." (Source: GISCO, statistical units.) Eurostat's general copyright notice allows commercial reuse of its own data, but says the general rules "can be subject to conditions which may be specified in individual copyright notices". The GISCO notice above is such a condition.

What we could not establish:

• The EuroGeographics licence agreements themselves. GISCO's metadata points to a "License conditions for EuroGeographics Administrative and Topographic spatial datasets" page. It needs an EU Login, so we could not read it.
• What licence applies to the Türkiye boundaries that GISCO says were made using OpenStreetMap data. OpenStreetMap data is under the Open Database Licence (ODbL), which has its own credit and share-alike rules. We could not find how GISCO treats this.

The maintainers place only their own work (the download script, the file layout and the descriptor) under the Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL). This does not cover the boundary data. See also ATTRIBUTION.txt.