UN M49
Standard for area codes used by the United Nations
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Some of these codes, those representing countries and territories, were first included as part of the ISO 3166-1 standard in its second edition in 1981, but they have been released by the United Nations Statistics Division since 1970.
Another part of these numeric codes, those representing geographical (continental and sub-continental) supranational regions, was also included in the IANA registry for region subtags (first described in September 2006 in the now obsoleted RFC 4646, but confirmed in its successor RFC 5646, published in September 2009) for use within language tags, as specified in IETF's BCP 47 (where the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes are used as region subtags, instead of UN M.49 codes, for countries and territories).
Code lists
M.49 area codes (as of December 2021)
- 001 World (248 entries)
- 019 Americas (57)
- 021 Northern America (5): 060, 124, 304, 666, 840
- 419 Latin America and the Caribbean (52)
- 013 Central America (8): 084, 188, 222, 320, 340, 484, 558, 591
- 029 Caribbean (28): 028, 044, 052, 092, 136, 192, 212, 214, 308, 312, 332, 388, 474, 500, 531, 533, 534, 535, 630, 652, 659, 660, 662, 663, 670, 780, 796, 850
- 005 South America (16): 032, 068, 074, 076, 152, 170, 218, 238, 239, 254, 328, 600, 604, 740, 858, 862
- 150 Europe (51)
- 154 Northern Europe (16): 208, 233, 234, 246, 248, 352, 372, 428, 440, 578, 744, 752, 826, 831, 832, 833
- 155 Western Europe (9): 040, 056, 250, 276, 438, 442, 492, 528, 756
- 151 Eastern Europe (10): 100, 112, 203, 348, 498, 616, 642, 643, 703, 804
- 039 Southern Europe (16): 008, 020, 070, 191, 292, 300, 336, 380, 470, 499, 620, 674, 688, 705, 724, 807
- 142 Asia (50)
- 145 Western Asia (18): 031, 051, 048, 196, 268, 275, 368, 376, 400, 414, 422, 512, 634, 682, 760, 792, 784, 887
- 143 Central Asia (5): 398, 417, 762, 795, 860
- 030 Eastern Asia (7): 156, 344, 392, 408, 410, 446, 496
- 034 Southern Asia (9): 004, 050, 064, 144, 356, 364, 462, 524, 586
- 035 South-eastern Asia (11): 096, 104, 116, 360, 418, 458, 608, 626, 702, 704, 764
- 002 Africa (60)
- 202 Sub-Saharan Africa (53)
- 011 Western Africa (17): 132, 204, 270, 288, 324, 384, 430, 466, 478, 562, 566, 624, 654, 686, 694, 768, 854
- 017 Middle Africa (9): 024, 120, 140, 148, 178, 180, 226, 266, 678
- 014 Eastern Africa (22): 086, 108, 174, 175, 231, 232, 260, 262, 404, 450, 454, 480, 508, 638, 646, 690, 706, 716, 728, 800, 834, 894
- 018 Southern Africa (5) 072, 426, 516, 710, 748
- 009 Oceania (29)
- 010 Antarctica (1): 010
- 019 Americas (57)
For the Americas, an alternative division into North and South (instead of Northern and Latin) America remains possible:
- 001 World (248 entries)
- 019 Americas (57)
- 003 North America (41)
- 021 Northern America (5)
- 013 Central America (8)
- 029 Caribbean (28)
- 005 South America (16)
- 003 North America (41)
- 019 Americas (57)
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Private-use codes and reserved codes
Beside the codes standardized above, the numeric codes 900 to 999 are reserved for private-use in ISO 3166-1 (under agreement by the UNSD) and in the UN M.49 standard. They may be used for any other groupings or subdivision of countries, territories and regions.
Some of these private-use codes may be found in some UN statistics reports and databases, for their own specific purpose. They are not portable across databases from third parties (except through private agreement), and may be changed without notice.
Note that the code 000 is reserved and not used for defining any region. It is used in absence of data, or for data in which no region (not even the World as a whole) is applicable. For unknown or unencoded regions, private-use codes should preferably be used. For example, the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository uses 961 for its grouping Outlying Oceania.
Extensions to M.49
Early editions of M.49 used one- or two-digit affixes to designate economic regions rather than assigning 3-digit codes to them.
The two-digit prefixes were designed to be used to easily aggregate data through the use of prefix matching, and regions could be specified collectively by using the 000 code as a base to which the prefix would be added. For example, by prefixing 13 to Algeria's code, 012, to create the five-digit code 13 012, Algeria could be identified as being in North Africa (13 000), which is itself in Africa (10 000).
One-digit suffixes were also permitted, to specify statistics of subdivisions of countries. For example, by suffixing 5 to the code for the United Kingdom 826 to create the four-digit code 826 5, Scotland could be represented as a subdivision of the United Kingdom.
Developed and developing regions
The United Nations Statistics Division classifies economic regions into developed and developing regions for statistical convenience. Although this classification was removed from M49 in December 2021, it is still used by the UNSD and various United Nations reports.