UN/LOCODE, the United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations, is a geographic coding scheme developed and maintained by United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). UN/LOCODE assigns codes to locations used in trade and transport with functions such as seaports, rail and road terminals, airports, Postal Exchange Office and border crossing points.

In addition to the present formal recommendation, the UN/LOCODE includes, as an Annex, the UN/LOCODE Manual which has three parts. Part 1 provides the technical details and further information regarding the features of the UN/LOCODE. Part 2 contains the actual code list with a list of place names, each with a code element and supported by certain classifiers and reference data, while Part 3 contains support codes. The UN/LOCODE is published in electronic form on the Internet World Wide Web.

The full text of UNECE Recommendation No 16 on “Codes for Trade and Transport Locations” (formerly “Codes for Ports and Other Locations”), with the text part of the Manual, as revised in 1998, is available at the site dedicated to the UNECE trade facilitation activity in general.

Act

RECOMMENDATION No. 16, third edition, adopted by the Centre for the Facilitation of Procedures Practices for Administration, Commerce and Transport 

ECE/TRADE/227 

Scope

This Recommendation aims at (a) providing a list of such locations which are of interest in international trade and transport and whose names need to be quoted in an unambiguous way in data interchange, (b) establishing coded epresentations of the names of these locations and (c) giving guidance for their use.