UN/LOCODE

The United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations, universally shortened to UN/LOCODE, is a standardised system for referring to the places involved in trade and transport — seaports, airports, inland freight terminals, border crossings and other locations of interest to commerce. Each location is given a five-character code: the first two letters are the ISO country code, and the remaining three characters identify the specific place within that country. For example, a major port is identified by a single unambiguous code that systems and documents around the world can recognise, avoiding the confusion caused by places that share a name or that are spelled differently in different languages.

The purpose of UN/LOCODE is to make the exchange of trade and transport information reliable and machine-readable. In shipping, logistics and customs, a great deal of data must move between many parties (carriers, ports, forwarders, banks and authorities) and referring to locations by a common code rather than by free-text names removes ambiguity and error. Booking systems, bills of lading, customs declarations, schedules and the electronic messages that pass between trading partners all use these codes to state where cargo is coming from and going to. The code list is maintained by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe and updated regularly as new locations are added.

UN/LOCODE is one of several coding systems that bring order to the identification of places and assets in shipping, alongside the IMO number for ships and standardised codes for cargo and equipment. Because it covers ports and terminals globally and is freely available, it has become a foundational reference for maritime and logistics software, port information systems and the growing exchange of digital trade documents. For anyone working with shipping data, the UN/LOCODE is the standard way to say exactly which port or place is meant, in a form that both people and computers can use consistently across borders and languages.