Statistics

The Global Gazetteer is a set of databases covering populated places, ports and airports, points of interest, administrative areas and countries. The information held includes administrational, locational, physical and demographic data.

With the wealth of data that we hold, there are an enormous range of facts and figures in lots of different categories. This page gathers all the statistics that are on various pages around our site so please refer to the appropriate page for more details. Please note: not all data is held for all records.

Due to the constantly changing nature of data, these figures should be taken a a guide only. Please contact us if you require more specific information.

Product summaries:
The Global Gazetteer
Populated places
Ports & Airports
Administrative areas
Related products

Pricing information is here


	The Global Gazetteer

Available to view are some population statistics and world-wide statistics summarised by field. Please refer to our free sample data and downloads page for a full breakdown of the fields included and some sample data.

Populated places

A database of more than four million world-wide locations, geocoded and enriched with much extra information, for example administrative levels, postcodes, telephone dialling codes and time zones.

If you want to see detailed statistics on the data held for all countries in the world, you can either download an Excel spreadsheet OR drill down from the links below to see the major statistics (eg number of records with provinces, postcodes, population, railway stations, ports and airports).

Follow these links to see the range of data held for each country in these areas:

Europe	North America	Central America	South America
Middle East	Africa	Far East	Oceania & Antarctica


	Ports, Airports and Railway stations

Approximately 5,400, 38,000 and 54,000 entries respectively, geocoded and linked to their locations. Airports, in particular, are enriched with various codes, such as height, runway length, an indication of importance, time zone and other data. The major effort in this area at the moment is the collection of names, and subsequent geocoding, of railway stations. These records continue to be developed and we believe that it is the most complete and extensive file available:

Airports: 41,096 of which 38,074 are geocoded
Ports: 5,960 of which 5,410 are geocoded
Railway stations: 160,503 of which 54,103 are geocoded

Follow this link to see the data held for each country in Port and Airport statistics

Administrative areas

Some 80,000 administrative areas at all levels, geocoded and enriched with parent area, area, population, code numbers, time zone information, alternative names, capital(s) of the area, and other vital data.

If you would like detailed statistics on administrative areas, please follow this link to our enquiry form.

Postcodes

There has been a major expansion of postcode data and there are now over 1.65 million places with postcodes on file. Regular work proceeds on geocoding records and on updating population and postcode information.

The current distribution of numbers across the broad groupings of places is as follows:

Group	Description	No. of geocoded records
1	'Country' capitals	246
2	Administrative centres	29,630
3	Places over 1,000 population	115,990
4	Other populated places	157,004
5	Places with postcodes	1,229,721
6	All other places with lat/long	1,897,234
7	Variant names	706,860

Each category is exclusive, eg a place which appears in Group 1 is not subsequently counted again in a lower group.

Please bear in mind that there are also some 1.35 million records without geocoding. These are mainly postcode records which are in the process of being geocoded, although there will always be a residue of very small places and settlements (eg farms) which cannot be geocoded.

Updated: 16 September 2003