Administrative divisions by country

Legend

* The "Type" column indicates a

federation A federation (also called a federal state) is an entity characterized by a political union, union of partially federated state, self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a #Federal governments, federal government (federalism) ...

(which includes lower-level units that exercise some sovereignty),

unitary state A unitary state is a (Sovereign state, sovereign) State (polity), state governed as a single entity in which the central government is the supreme authority. The central government may create or abolish administrative divisions (sub-national or ...

(where the highest-level entity is the only sovereign), or

regional state A regional state, or a regionalised unitary state, is a term used to denote a type of state that is formally Unitary state, unitary but where a high degree of political power has been highly decentralised to regional governments. This contrasts w ...

(unitary with substantial delegation of power) * Terms in ''italics'' are terms in languages other than English, in plural form (except languages that take the singular form with numbers, such as Hungarian). * Square brackets indicate a term that has not yet been confirmed. The table below indicates the types and, where known, numbers of

administrative division Administrative divisions (also administrative units, administrative regions, subnational entities, or constituent states, as well as many similar generic terms) are geographical areas into which a particular independent sovereign state is divi ...

s used by countries and their major

dependent territories A dependent territory, dependent area, or dependency (sometimes referred as an external territory) is a territory that does not possess full political independence or sovereignty as a sovereign state and remains politically outside the control ...

Member and observer states of the United Nations

Member states of United Nations specialized agencies

Other states

Lists of political and geographic subdivisions by total area This is an index of a series of comprehensive lists of continents, countries, and first level administrative country subdivisions such as states, provinces, and territories, as well as certain political and geographic features of substantial area ...

, comparing continents, countries, and first-level administrative country subdivisions. * List of first-level administrative divisions by population *

List of FIPS region codes This is a list of FIPS 10-4 region codes, using a standardized name format, and cross-linking to articles. The list is broken up into alphabetical sections. List of FIPS region codes (A–C), ABC – List of FIPS region codes (D–F), DEF – Lis ...

FIPS 10-4 The Federal Information Processing Standard, FIPS 10-4 standard, ''Countries, Dependencies, Areas of Special Sovereignty, and Their Principal Administrative Divisions'', was a list of two-letter country codes that were used by the U.S. Government ...

, withdrawn from the

Federal Information Processing Standard The Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) of the United States are a set of publicly announced standards that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed for use in computer systems of non-military United Stat ...

(FIPS) in 2008 *

Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics or NUTS () is a geocode standard for referencing the administrative divisions of countries for statistical purposes. The standard, adopted in 2003, is developed and regulated by the European ...

(NUTS), which covers the subdivisions of the members of the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are Geography of the European Union, located primarily in Europe. The u ...

Notes

References

{{Terms for types of country subdivisions Administrative divisions

administrative divisions Administrative divisions (also administrative units, administrative regions, subnational entities, or constituent states, as well as many similar generic terms) are geographical areas into which a particular independent sovereign state is divi ...