NACE vs ISIC vs CPA

NACE — «nomenclature statistique des activités économiques dans la Communauté européenne» — is the European Union's standard for classifying what a business does. It is maintained by Eurostat, mandated by Regulation (EC) No 1893/2006, and currently at revision 2.1. Every EU member state uses it as the backbone of its national activity classification.

ISIC — the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities — is the United Nations' equivalent, maintained by the UN Statistics Division. It is the global reference against which most national and regional systems, including NACE, are aligned. The current version is ISIC Rev. 5.

CPA — the Statistical Classification of Products by Activity — is the European product classification, structurally linked to NACE at the class level. Where NACE tells you what an economic unit does, CPA tells you what it produces. The current version is CPA 2.1.

NACE has four hierarchical levels: 21 sections (letters A–U), 88 divisions (2 digits), 272 groups (3 digits) and 658 classes (4 digits). Each member state may add a fifth national digit to produce a country-specific extension — NAF in France, WZ in Germany, CAE in Portugal, SBI in the Netherlands, ATECO in Italy, and so on. The first four digits of every one of these systems are, by construction, a NACE class.

Because NACE is set by regulation and not by directive, it applies directly and identically across every member state. That is why cross-border business statistics in the EU compare like with like at the class level, without an intermediate translation step.

ISIC is structured similarly to NACE — sections, divisions, groups, classes — but its scope is worldwide. NACE is the European regional adaptation of ISIC: at the two-digit division level the two are identical, and at the three-digit group level they remain closely aligned. Divergence appears at the four-digit class level, where NACE splits certain classes more finely to reflect European reporting needs.

For international comparisons or for reporting into UN, IMF or World Bank datasets, ISIC is the correct reference. Eurostat and the UN Statistics Division publish official correspondence tables so that any NACE class can be rolled up to its ISIC parent without ambiguity.

CPA answers a different question: not what an enterprise does, but what it produces. Its structure mirrors NACE class-by-class — the CPA code for a category of products is derived from the NACE code of the activity that principally produces them. This makes CPA the natural bridge between activity statistics (structural business statistics, national accounts) and product statistics (PRODCOM for manufactured goods, CN for external trade).

If a question is about turnover, employment or the number of enterprises, use NACE. If a question is about production, sales or trade of specific products, use CPA.

For any EU-facing filing — company registration, VAT, structural business statistics, employment reporting — use NACE, or the national five-digit variant your country prescribes (NAF, WZ, CAE, SBI, ATECO). For statistics that must aggregate with the rest of the world, or for reporting to UN agencies, translate NACE to ISIC using the official correspondence table. For product-level reporting — manufacturing output, sales by product, product-level VAT categories — use CPA, deriving it from the producer's NACE class.

Is NACE the same as ISIC? No, but they are aligned. NACE is the European regional adaptation of ISIC; the two match exactly at the division (2-digit) level and diverge only in the finer detail of certain classes.

Can I convert an ISIC code to NACE? Yes, for most classes. Eurostat and the UN Statistics Division publish official ISIC ↔ NACE correspondence tables. Some ISIC classes map to a single NACE class; others split into several.

What is the difference between NACE and CPA? NACE classifies what a business does; CPA classifies what it produces. They share the same first four digits, but they answer different statistical questions.

Does NACE map to NAICS? Only indirectly. NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System (US, Canada, Mexico) and follows its own logic. The bridge between NACE and NAICS is ISIC — both systems can be translated to ISIC, and from there compared.