ISIC (International Standard Industrial Classification)

The International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC) is the United Nations reference framework for organising economic activities into a coherent hierarchy, widely used by national statistical offices, development banks, and international organisations as the backbone for sector-based analysis and procurement classification.

What is ISIC?

ISIC groups all economic activities into sections (single letter), divisions (two digits), groups (three digits), and classes (four digits). Agriculture, manufacturing, construction, financial services, and information technology each sit in their own section, then subdivide progressively to specific activity classes. Maintained by the UN Statistics Division, ISIC is not a product code but an industry-activity code: it describes what a firm does rather than what it sells. Many countries build their own national industry classification systems as extensions or derivatives of ISIC, making it the common ancestor shared by naics-north-american-industry-classification-system in North America and similar national systems globally.

In procurement, ISIC appears most visibly in development-bank project classifications and sector eligibility criteria. The World Bank, UN agencies, and regional development banks often label projects with their ISIC sector so that interested firms can filter opportunities by their primary industry. The cpc-central-product-classification system, which classifies products, is designed to link directly to ISIC activity classes.

Why ISIC matters for bidders

Because ISIC is the reference layer beneath many national systems, understanding your firm's ISIC class helps you interpret sector-specific eligibility requirements in international calls for proposals and navigate development-bank project databases that use sector filters. When a multilateral tender lists an eligible sector using ISIC terminology, matching your capabilities to the correct class strengthens your eligibility narrative in qualification documents. It also helps you benchmark your firm against sector-level procurement statistics published by international organisations, which can guide market-entry decisions for new geographies.

FAQ

How is ISIC different from NAICS?

ISIC is the global UN reference framework for economic activities; NAICS is the North American implementation used for US, Canadian, and Mexican procurement. NAICS was designed to be broadly compatible with ISIC but uses a different digit structure and more granular US-specific categories.

Does ISIC classify products or industries?

ISIC classifies industries and economic activities, not individual products. For product-level classification, the companion system is the UN's Central Product Classification (cpc-central-product-classification).

Which version of ISIC is current?

The current version is ISIC Revision 4, published by the UN Statistics Division. Some national systems and older international databases still reference Revision 3, so checking which revision a portal uses avoids mismatched sector codes.