(fra kommisjonsforordningen)

(1) Regulation (EU) 2025/2458 establishes a common legal framework for the development, production and dissemination of European statistics on population and housing. 

(2) In order to ensure that data on population and housing provided under Regulation (EU) 2025/2458 to the Commission (Eurostat) are comparable across the Union Member States, the list of variables and their technical specifications and breakdowns, the statistical classifications to be used, as well as the detailed specifications of the statistical units and dedicated adjustment categories should be defined in the same way in all Member States. 

(3) In particular, it is necessary to specify the content and structure of the data sets and accompanying metadata of quarterly, annual and multi-annual frequency, and of the decennial population and housing census, as well as the technical formats for the transmission of these data sets and metadata. 

(4) Statistics on territorial units, economic sectors, occupations and education levels should be comparable internationally, and therefore the Member States and the Union institutions should use statistical classifications that are compatible with the NUTS, NACE, ISCO and ISCED classifications. 

(5) Statistical breakdowns by countries and territories compiled under Regulation (EU) 2025/2458 and Regulation (EC) No 862/2007 of the European Parliament and of the Council should be comparable. Therefore, it is necessary to specify the lists of countries and territories that apply to breakdowns of statistics compiled under Regulation (EU) 2025/2458. Those lists apply as well for the compilation of statistics under Regulation (EC) No 862/2007 in accordance with Article 10a thereof. 

(6) The Single Integrated Metadata Structure has been approved as a metadata standard by the European Statistical System Committee. The Commission has invited Member States to ensure that their national statistical authorities apply the statistical concepts listed therein when compiling reference metadata and quality reports and when exchanging reference metadata and quality reports. 

(7) The relevant context for grid-level statistics under Regulation (EU) 2025/2458 is established in Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council and the related Commission implementing regulations lay down the required metadata, data format, and network services for the dissemination of spatial data. In particular, point 1 of Annex III to Directive 2007/2/EC covers possible statistical grid systems for spatial data dissemination and is, pursuant to point 10 of Annex III, applicable to spatial datasets under the theme ‘Population distribution — demography’. 

(8) To calculate Union-level aggregates and other indicators, the Commission (Eurostat) needs complete data sets from all Member States. In order to avoid as far as possible the suppression of data in dissemination, when setting up the data collection systems, Member States should favour effective and efficient statistical disclosure control methods that minimise the number of confidential values in their data. In that regard, Eurostat, in cooperation with European Statistical System experts, provided guidelines and software tools for statistical disclosure control methods for census and demographics data, including grid level data. Methods may include traditional suppression, that is, marking confidential data not to be published, or perturbative methods, for instance forms of rounding, record swapping or other forms of adding controlled small noise to the data. Eurostat will continue to support Member States in applying modern, efficient methods and will prepare its data collection infrastructure to be able to receive perturbatively protected data. 

(9) The measures provided for in this Regulation are in accordance with the opinion of the European Statistical System Committee,