OECD Regions and Cities at a Glance 2026

Reader’s guide

This guide summarises the geographic areas and typologies used in this edition, as well as the period coverage. The Annexes A and B complement this information.

Geographic areas and their typologies

This publication features statistical indicators at three scales: i) administrative regions; ii) functional aggregations of local units and iii) areas defined from grid cells of regular size.

Category	Description
Administrative subnational regions	Large region (Territorial Level 2, TL2)
	Small region (Territorial Level 3, TL3)
Functional aggregations of local units	Functional urban areas (FUAs) (based on local units) Cities (based on local units) Labour market areas (LMAs) (based on local units)
Grid cell areas	Degree of urbanisation (cities, towns and semi-dense areas, and rural areas)

Administrative regions

Administrative regions are the regional boundaries within a country as organised by governments. As such, they refer to areas that are often under the responsibility of a particular subnational government or to the scale targeted by a specific policy implemented at the national or subnational level. Regions are classified into two scales, large (Territorial Level 2, TL2) and small (Territorial Level 3, TL3).

Functional urban areas (FUAs)

The report uses the definition of FUA developed by the European Commission (EC) and the OECD (Dijkstra, Poelman and Veneri, 2019[1]). FUAs consist of “cities”, defined as local units where at least half of the population live in clusters of densely populated grid cells with at least 50 000 inhabitants, and “commuting zones” defined as adjacent local units with high levels of commuting (travel-to-work flows) towards the cities. A minimum threshold for the population size of FUAs is set at 50 000 inhabitants. The definition identifies 1 285 FUAs in all OECD Member countries except Costa Rica, and 50 FUAs in three OECD accession countries for which data on commuting flows are available (Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania).

The report uses the following population size categories:

• Large FUAs: over 1.5 million inhabitants;

• Midsize FUAs: over 250 000 to 1.5 million inhabitants;

• Small FUAs: over 100 000 to 250 000 inhabitants; and

• Very small FUAs: between 50 000 and 100 000 inhabitants.

Common thresholds and similar geographical units across countries were defined to establish this cross‑country methodology. These units and thresholds may not correspond to the ones chosen in the national definitions. Therefore, the resulting FUAs may differ from the ones derived from national definitions and the OECD functional urban delimitation may not capture all the local factors and dynamics in the same way as national definitions.

Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) are periodically updated by the OECD to reflect revisions to the underlying population grid, administrative boundaries and commuting data used to delineate cities and their commuting zones. In this edition, FUA boundaries have been updated for EU countries in accordance with the Eurostat/GISCO 2024 revision.

Territorial level classification

Regions within the 38 OECD countries are classified on 2 territorial levels reflecting the administrative organisation of countries. The 435 OECD large (TL2) regions represent the first administrative tier of subnational government, for example, the Ontario province in Canada. The 2026 territorial grid identifies 2 420 OECD small (TL3) regions, each TL3 being contained in a TL2 region (except for the United States). Additionally, 134 large regions have been identified in the eight OECD accession countries, as well as 91 small regions in three countries with data (Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania). TL3 regions correspond to administrative regions, except for Australia, Canada, Germany and the United States. All regions are defined within national borders. TL2 and TL3 regions are equivalent in Estonia and Latvia.

This classification – which, for European countries, is largely consistent with the Eurostat Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) 2024 classification – facilitates greater comparability of geographic units at the same territorial level. Indeed, these two levels, which are officially established and relatively stable in all member countries, are used as a framework for implementing regional policies in most countries.

The report refers to “capital-city regions” as TL2 or TL3 regions that include the administrative capital city of each country.

This report uses shortened labels in figures when relevant. The OECD territorial correspondence table includes a shortened name to enhance readability of graphs, besides the official name and the English or French translation. In shortened names, terms such as “Region”, “District”, or “Province” are omitted, while the terms “North”, “West”, “East”, “South”, “Central”, ‘Island’ are abbreviated to N., W., E., S., C., I., respectively.

Aggregated metropolitan regions (TL3C)

For analyses conducted at the TL3 level, aggregated metropolitan regions are defined by combining TL3 regions where at least half of the population resides in FUAs with at least 250 000 inhabitants. The resulting territorial units are referred to as TL3C regions. This aggregation helps mitigate distortions caused by commuting patterns. The small TL3 regions connected to FUAs can be found in the OECD Territorial Correspondence Table (xlsx).

Classification of small regions by typology on access to FUAs

The OECD typology for small regions by access to FUAs helps to assess differences in socio-economic trends in regions – both within and across countries – by controlling for the presence/absence of metropolitan areas and the extent to which the latter is accessible by the population living in each region (Fadic et al., 2019[2]).

According to such typology, TL3C regions are classified as “metropolitan” if more than half of their population live in an FUA of at least 250 000 inhabitants and as “non-metropolitan” otherwise. A “metropolitan region” becomes a “large metropolitan region” if the FUA, accounting for more than half of the regional population, has over 1.5 million inhabitants. The typology further classifies “non-metropolitan” regions based on the size of the FUA that is most accessible to the regional population. “Non-metropolitan” TL3 regions are sub-classified into three possible types:

• With access to a FUA with at least 250 000 inhabitants (>250K), if at least half of the regional population can reach an FUA of at least 250 000 inhabitants within a 60-minute car ride.

• With access to a FUA with less than 250 000 inhabitants (<250K), if at least half of the regional population can reach an FUA of between 50 000 and 250 000 inhabitants within a 60-minute car ride.

• Remote, if reaching the closest FUA by car takes more than 60 minutes for more than half of the regional population.

The method relies on publicly available grid-level population data and localised information on driving conditions. In this report, the five types of regions identified are sometimes aggregated into three classes only, as indicated in the table below.

 

Acronym	Grouping	Reduced grouping
MR-L	Large metropolitan region	Metropolitan region
MR-M	Midsize metropolitan region
NM-M	Region near a FUA>250K	Region near a midsize/large FUA	Non-metropolitan region
NM-S	Region near a FUA<250K	Region far from a midsize/large FUA
NM-R	Remote region

The classification of small regions according to their typology of access to FUAs is available in the OECD Territorial Correspondence Table (xlsx). Israel is not included in the classification because it delineated its FUA boundaries after the latest update of the classification.

Classification of regions by demographic change typology

The OECD demographic change typology (OECD, 2025[3]) uses a reference period to classify TL2 or TL3 regions as: growing if they experienced average annual percentage change of 0.2% or more; stable if they experienced changes between -0.2% and 0.2%; and shrinking if they experienced changes of -0.2% or less. See (OECD, 2025[3]) for more details.

Labour Market Areas

Labour Market Areas (LMAs) are drawn from official definitions from national statistical offices and other government agencies for 15 OECD countries. Labour market areas group small administrative units or other subnational areas so that most working residents work within the area and most jobs are filled by people living there. Unlike FUAs, they are delineated for entire territories.

LMAs are generally smaller than TL3 regions and therefore provide an intermediate geography between small administrative units and TL3 regions. To ensure consistency between LMAs and FUAs, LMAs with more than 50% of their population in the same FUA are merged. See Annex C for more details.

Degree of urbanisation

The degree of urbanisation classifies local units uniquely as: i) “cities”; ii) “towns and semi-dense areas”; and iii) “rural areas”. The classification is carried out in two steps:

• Step 1: Identifying three types of grid cells:

  • An urban centre consists of contiguous grid cells with a density of at least 1 500 inhabitants per square kilometre (km²) and has a population of at least 50 000 inhabitants.

  • An urban cluster consists of contiguous grid cells with a density of at least 300 inhabitants per km² and a population of at least 5 000 inhabitants.

  • Rural grid cells are cells that do not belong to an urban cluster. Most of these will have a density below 300 inhabitants per km².

• Step 2: Classifying local units:

  This step is an overlay of Step-1 classification onto local units:

  1. Cities: local units that have at least 50% of their population in urban centres

  2. Towns and semi-dense areas: local units that have less than 50% of their population in urban centres and less than 50% of their population in rural grid cells

  3. Rural areas: local units that have at least 50% of their population in rural grid cells.

See (OECD et al., 2021[4]) for more details.

Period and country coverage

The cut-off date for data included in the publication was 2 August 2026. Due to the time lag of subnational statistics, the last available year is generally 2025 for demographic and labour market and 2024 for socio-economic indicators.

Besides OECD Member countries, all figures include OECD accession candidate countries where data are available.

Throughout this publication, “OECD countries” refers to OECD Members; “OECD accession countries” refers to OECD accession candidate countries; and “OECD Member and accession countries” refers to both groups of countries.

Further resources

Regions and Cities at a Glance uses the OECD’s StatLink service. A URL below each table and figure leads to a corresponding Excel file containing the underlying data for the indicator.

The OECD Database on Regions, Cities and Local Areas on the OECD Data Explorer (https://data-explorer.oecd.org/) provides the raw data and indicators presented in Regions and Cities at a Glance, along with metadata. This platform enables users to explore the data in more depth than is available in this publication and is regularly updated.

A tool with interactive maps, charts and key indicators to support the exploration of country-level data across OECD countries is available through the OECD Local Data Portal (https://localdataportal.oecd.org/).

Acronyms and abbreviations

 

Acronym/abbreviation	Description
AI	Artificial intelligence
Access.	OECD accession countries
CAGR	Compound annual growth rate
COVID-19	Coronavirus disease 2019
CO₂eq	Carbon dioxide equivalent
CV	Coefficient of variation
DEGURBA	Degree of urbanisation
EC	European Commission
EC JRC	European Commission Joint Research Centre
ECMWF	European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
EDGAR	Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research
FUA	Functional urban area
GDP	Gross domestic product
GenAI	Generative artificial intelligence
GHG	Greenhouse gas
GHSL	Global human settlement layer
GVA	Gross value added
IEA	International Energy Agency
KIBS	Knowledge-intensive business services
LAC	Latin American countries
LMA	Labour market area
LQ	Location quotient
N. America	Northern America
PCT	Patent Cooperation Treaty
POI	Point of interest
p.p.	Percentage point
PPP	Purchasing power parity
NZE	Net zero emissions
ROPI	Regional output price index
SAU3	Small area unit, Level 3
SD	Standard deviation
SSP	Shared Socio-economic Pathway
TL2	Territorial Level 2
TL3	Territorial Level 3
TL3C	Aggregated metropolitan regions
UN	United Nations
VC	Venture capital

OECD Member and accession candidate country ISO codes

 

ISO code	Country	ISO code	Country
OECD Member countries
AUS	Australia	ISL	Iceland
AUT	Austria	ISR	Israel
BEL	Belgium	ITA	Italy
CAN	Canada	JPN	Japan
CHE	Switzerland	KOR	Korea
CHL	Chile	LTU	Lithuania
COL	Colombia	LUX	Luxembourg
CRI	Costa Rica	LVA	Latvia
CZE	Czechia	MEX	Mexico
DEU	Germany	NLD	Netherlands
DNK	Denmark	NOR	Norway
ESP	Spain	NZL	New Zealand
EST	Estonia	POL	Poland
FIN	Finland	PRT	Portugal
FRA	France	SVK	Slovak Republic
GBR	United Kingdom	SVN	Slovenia
GRC	Greece	SWE	Sweden
HUN	Hungary	TUR	Türkiye
IRL	Ireland	USA	United States
OECD accession candidate countries
BGR	Bulgaria	IDN	Indonesia
BRA	Brazil	PER	Peru
HRV	Croatia	ROU	Romania

Further reading

[1] Dijkstra, L., H. Poelman and P. Veneri (2019), “The EU-OECD definition of a functional urban area”, OECD Regional Development Working Papers, No. 2019/11, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/d58cb34d-en.

[2] Fadic, M. et al. (2019), “Classifying small (TL3) regions based on metropolitan population, low density and remoteness”, OECD Regional Development Working Papers, No. 2019/06, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/b902cc00-en.

[3] OECD (2025), Classifying shrinking regions: Shrinking smartly and sustainably, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/0185fe09-en.

[4] OECD et al. (2021), Applying the Degree of Urbanisation: A Methodological Manual to Define Cities, Towns and Rural Areas for International Comparisons, OECD Regional Development Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris/European Union, Brussels, https://doi.org/10.1787/4bc1c502-en.