Hierarchy of standard geographic units

Hierarchy of standard geographic units: Tutorial

To take full advantage of census data, users should have a basic understanding of the geography of the data. Just as a population can be subdivided by sex, age groups, income ranges or occupation categories, it can also be subdivided by different geographic units.

Each box in the hierarchy represents a standard geographic unit used by Statistics Canada for analysing and publishing data. These are either administrative (areas legislated by federal or provincial laws) or statistical (areas created by Statistics Canada to support the collection and dissemination of data).

Hierarchy of standard geographic units