Generally, a local administrative unit (LAU) is an area of governmental administration below a province, region, state or other major national subdivision. Not all countries will use this term, but it can be descriptively applied anywhere.
Specifically, in the European Union (EU), LAUs are basic components of Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) regions. Two levels of Local Administrative Units (LAU) have been defined. The upper LAU level (LAU level 1, formerly NUTS level 4) is defined for the following countries: Czech Republic, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Cyprus, Latvia, Lituania, Luxembourg, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland and the United Kingdom. The second LAU level (formerly NUTS level 5) consists of 112,119 municipalities or equivalent units in the 25 EU Member States (2003 situation).