Territory by type of region, 2013

Each Member State has its own definition of a rural area. For the sake of consistency in all their publications on the subject, the European Commission and its statistical office, Eurostat, adopted a new methodology in 2010, dividing Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) Level 3 regions (the smallest classification size) into three further categories: predominantly rural, intermediate, and predominantly urban areas. According to the Eurostat regional yearbook 2013 (Chapter 15), predominantly rural regions represent 52% of EU territory and have a population of 112.1 million people, or 22.3% of the (then) EU-27 population.