Generally, a local administrative unit (LAU) is a low level administrative division of a country, ranked below a province, region, or state. Not all countries describe their locally governed areas this way, but it can be descriptively applied anywhere to refer to counties, municipalities, etc.
In the European Union, LAUs are basic components of Classification of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) regions. For each EU member country, two levels of Local Administrative Units (LAU) are defined: LAU-1 and LAU-2, which were previously called NUTS-4 and NUTS-5 respectively, until the NUTS regulation went into force in July 2003. For some countries, the LAU-1 level is not defined, and thus equivalent to the NUTS-3 level. A similar statistical system is defined for the candidate countries and members of the European Free Trade Association.