Who governs NACE?

NACE was established by Regulation (EC) No 1893/2006 of the European Parliament and of the Council, which made it binding on all member states for the production of European statistics. That regulation was amended in 2023 to introduce NACE Rev. 2.1, the current version.

Because NACE is set by a regulation rather than a directive, it applies directly and identically in every member state: national parliaments do not transpose it, they implement it.

Day-to-day custodianship sits with Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union based in Luxembourg. Eurostat publishes the official manual, maintains the correspondence tables to and from older revisions and to non-EU classifications, and coordinates revisions with the national statistical institutes (NSIs) of the 27 member states.

Each NSI — INE in Portugal, INSEE in France, DESTATIS in Germany, CBS in the Netherlands, ISTAT in Italy, and so on — translates the classification into its own language and, in most cases, extends it with a fifth digit to create a national activity classification tuned to local reporting needs. CAE in Portugal, NAF in France, WZ in Germany, SBI in the Netherlands and ATECO in Italy are all direct national extensions of NACE.

NACE is not built in isolation. It is fully aligned with the United Nations' International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC), and its detailed structure is designed so that every NACE class rolls up cleanly to an ISIC class. This alignment lets EU statistics be aggregated with the rest of the world's official statistics without translation losses.