The 'GISCO NUTS 2021' data set represents the NUTS 2021 regulation and statistical regions by means of multipart polygon, polyline and point topology. The NUTS geographical information is completed by attribute tables and a set of cartographic help lines to better visualize multipart polygonal regions.

The NUTS nomenclature is a hierarchical classification of statistical regions defined by Eurostat. The NUTS classification subdivides the EU economic territory into 3 statistical levels. The NUTS 2021 classification has been established through the Commission Delegated Regulation 2019/1755, which entered into force on 8th August 2019 and applies from 1st January 2021. A non official NUTS-like classification has been defined for the EFTA countries and the candidate countries.

At present, six scale ranges (100K, 1M, 3M, 10M and 20M, 60M) are maintained in the GISCO geodatabase. The polygon and boundary classes delineate the regions, while the points provide an anchor for each region. Associated tables contain basic information such as the name of the region. The public data set will be available at 1M, 3M, 10M, 20M, 60M, while the full data set at 100K is restricted.

The data set covers EU Member States, EFTA countries, EU candidate countries and the UK. Following the departure of the UK from the European Union, the UK is no longer flagged as an EU Member State but retains its place in the NUTS and statistical regions data set.

This dataset (NUTS_2021) is derived from the EuroBoundary Map 2020 (EBM2020) from Eurogeographics as well as GISCO NUTS 2016 (from Türkiye). The list of NUTS2021 codes including changes with respect to NUTS2016 is available on https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/345175/629341/NUTS2021.xlsx. The public metadata for NUTS 2021 released by Eurostat is available here: https://gisco-services.ec.europa.eu/distribution/v2/nuts/nuts-2021-metadata.xml.

This revision (May 2021) includes minor changes in the dataset such as (see https://gisco-services.ec.europa.eu/distribution/v2/nuts/nuts-2021-release-notes.txt):

* 2020-10-05 Point snapping is disabled in all datasets, number of decimals increased for 01M datasets.

* 2020-11-18 Inclusion of Jan Mayen and Svalbard in to Norways Statistical Regions. Amendment to Serbia NUTS BN line status.

* 2020-12-05 Fixed broken utf-8 encoding.

* 2021-03-15 Added LAU 2011,2012,2013,2014,2015,2020

* 2021-04-26 Fixed country labels 2001, 2006 (incorrect Kosovo coordinates)

IMPORTANT NOTE: Additional information, including the conditions of use and acknowledgement notice is included in the document provided with the dataset "GISCO NUTS 2021 Additional Information.pdf". Public access to this data set is restricted due to intellectual property rights. It shall only be used internally by the EEA, its ETCs and subcontractors working on behalf of the EEA. This metadata has been slightly adapted from the original metadata information provided by Eurostat (European Commission) and is to be used only for internal EEA purposes.

An introduction to the NUTS classification is available here: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/nuts/overview.