UN/LOCODE
UN/LOCODE, the United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations, is a geographic coding scheme developed and maintained by United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. UN/LOCODE assigns codes to locations used in trade and transport with functions such as seaports, rail and road terminals, airports, Postal Exchange Office and border crossing points. The first issue in 1981 contained codes for 8,000 locations. The version from 2011 contained codes for about 82,000 locations.
Structure
UN/LOCODEs have five characters. The first two letters code a country by the table defined in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2. The three remaining characters code a location within that country. Letters are preferred, but if necessary digits 2 through 9 may be used, excluding "0" and "1" to avoid confusion with the letters "O" and "I" respectively.For each country there can be a maximum of 17,576 entries using only letters, or 39,304 entries using letters and digits.
For the US, the letter combinations have almost all been exhausted. So in 2006, the Secretariat added 646 entries with a digit as the last character.
Loose consistency with existing IATA airport codes
For airports, the three letters following the country code are not always identical to the IATA airport code. According to the Secretariat note for Issue 2006-2, there are 720 locations showing a different IATA code.Official UN/LOCODE tables
UN/LOCODEs are released as a table. An individual revision is officially referred to as an "issue". A discussion of the table's structure follows.Examples
;Explanations:- for New York City in the United States. Subdivision is the U.S. state of New York. Function: port, rail, road, airport, postal. IATA code is NYC. Coordinates:.
- for Berlin in Germany. Subdivision is the German state of Berlin. Function: port, rail, road, airport, postal. IATA code is BER. Coordinates:.
- for Berlin-Tegel Airport in Germany. Function: airport. IATA code is TXL.
- for Paris in France. Subdivision is the French department of Paris. Function: port, rail, road, postal.
- for Par in United Kingdom. Subdivision is the English county of Cornwall. Function: port.
- for Göteborg in Sweden. Subdivision is the Swedish county of Västra Götaland. Function: port, airport, postal. The IATA code of XWL indicated in the table is that of a train station in the city centre of Göteborg, while the IATA code for the main airport is actually GOT. It also has a separate reference entry showing an alternate spelling of Gothenburg.
Data fields
The fields are listed in the official order.Date
Availability
AvailabilityUN/LOCODE is available on the, where the latest release of UNLOCODE directories and background documents are listed. Complete UN/LOCODE code list may be downloaded in the format of.mdb,.txt and.csv. HTML pages are also displayed on the website by countries.
Data Maintenance Requests
UN/LOCODE Data Maintenance Request system is web-based, which enables registered users to submit online requests for new UN/LOCODE entry modifications.The system provides online functions for