National Geographic Code — Algeria (2021)

Algeria's 1,541 communes and 58 wilayas, current as of the 2021 territorial division. This is the finest administrative level the statistics office publishes, and the only reference that allows going below the wilaya.

This reference is free, deliberately so. A nomenclature has no time series, is not revised and is freely available: selling it would make no sense. Its value is to make our other products joinable — demography, housing, fisheries, the vehicle fleet and the business registers all carry the official wilaya code, and this file gives them the commune level as a horizon.

Three columns that make a key. The four-digit geographic code — two for the wilaya, two for the commune — the commune's French name, and its wilaya's name. The code is the join key; the names are descriptive.

The document states its own size, and we reached it: 58 wilayas, 1,541 communes. That is a rare check — most statistical tables do not announce themselves — and it is what let us refuse three incomplete readings before this one.

What the layout demanded. Columns drift through the document, and one sheet carries two sets when it lists two wilayas: page 65 places In Salah in one position and Touggourt thirteen points to its left. No band of coordinates, even recomputed per page, holds both. Each row is therefore read on its own.

Something that is not an error, and worth knowing. Commune numbers have gaps: Adrar runs 01, 02, 04, 05, 06, 08. The 2019 reform moved some of its communes to Timimoun and Bordj Badji Mokhtar, and those remaining kept their original numbers. Those gaps are a property of the territorial division, not a missing row — and taking them for an error made us reject eleven perfectly read wilayas.

The Arabic name is not carried over. Its fragments leave the PDF out of order, and reassembling them by position yields the wrong spelling: bidirectional typesetting cuts words mid-ligature. Nothing allows verifying the result, and a wrong name in a reference table is worse than an absent one — the buyer would take it as official.

Source. National Geographic Code, June 2021.