Revisions and the jump to Rev. 2.1

Economies evolve. New industries appear, others merge or disappear, and once-marginal sub-sectors grow large enough to deserve their own class. A statistical classification that does not evolve with the economy silently loses accuracy: brand-new activities get bucketed into generic "other" classes, and time series stop meaning what they used to.

To keep NACE useful without destabilising every downstream user, revisions are deliberate, infrequent and coordinated with the corresponding UN revision of ISIC. Rev. 1 arrived in 1993, Rev. 1.1 in 2002, Rev. 2 in 2006 (applied from 2008), and Rev. 2.1 was adopted in 2023 and applies to reference year 2025 onwards.

From reference year 2025, statistical reporting across the EU switches from NACE Rev. 2 (in force since 2008) to NACE Rev. 2.1. The four-digit class code keeps its familiar shape — most classes keep the same number — but a set of activities is renamed, split, merged or newly created.

The most visible NACE 2025 changes affect digital platforms, data-centre and cloud services, renewable-energy generation, repair and reuse, waste treatment, and health and social care. National statistical institutes republish their 5-digit local subclasses (NAF, WZ, CAE, ATECO, CNAE, SBI, PKD, …) on the same date, so a business may see its local code change even when the underlying activity has not.

NACEBridge exposes both revisions in parallel and every cross-border conversion falls through the official Eurostat correspondence table between Rev. 2 and Rev. 2.1.

Rev. 2.1 is a minor revision — the structure survived and the vast majority of classes are unchanged. The main additions and refinements target activities that were under-represented or misclassified under Rev. 2:

· platform-mediated services (marketplaces, gig work, sharing-economy operators),

· data centres, cloud infrastructure and specialised digital services,

· repair and reuse of goods, in line with circular-economy policy,

· renewable-energy generation and grid balancing, split out from generic electricity production,

· waste-treatment and recycling activities, restructured for greater granularity,

· health and social-care activities, refined to reflect post-pandemic reporting needs.

For anyone maintaining a time series that spans the changeover, the practical rule is: never renumber the historic points, and always store the revision alongside the code. NACEBridge does exactly this — every class in our data carries its revision year, and cross-revision queries fall through the official correspondence table maintained by Eurostat.