NACE code for software and IT companies

There is no single NACE code for software. A company that sells its own software product belongs in class 58.29 (58.21 if the product is a video game), a development shop that writes code for clients in 62.10, an IT consultancy in 62.20 and a hosting or cloud provider in 63.10. Since NACE Rev. 2.1, the first of these sits in a different section from the other three.

The NACE classes for software and IT

Six classes in NACE Rev. 2.1 cover most software and IT businesses. The summaries below follow the explanatory notes in the Eurostat manual.

Some IT activities fall outside divisions 58 to 63. Selling software on physical media is retail (47.40) or wholesale (46.50), repairing computers is 95.10, and installing mainframe computers is 33.20. General cybersecurity training goes to 85.59.

Publishing or programming: the SaaS question

The deciding question is whether you work on your own account or on behalf of a client. If you develop software and sell it under your own name, as a licence, a download or a subscription, you are publishing: 58.29. The manual counts the development and continuous updating of self-published software as part of publishing. If you write or adapt software on behalf of a client who then owns or uses it, that is 62.10.

SaaS is the case where the choice looks least obvious. The staff write code all day, so 62.10 seems to fit. But the notes for 62.10 explicitly exclude the publishing of cloud-based software and point to group 58.2. A SaaS business that runs its own product is therefore a software publisher, even though it never ships a box or a download.

Two related cases are easy to miss. Hosting someone else's application is 63.10, not publishing. And the online provision of software that is not linked to publishing it goes to 60.39, “Other content distribution activities”.

Section J or K: why the letter changed

In NACE Rev. 2, divisions 58 to 63 all sat in section J, “Information and communication”. NACE Rev. 2.1 splits that section. Division 58 (publishing, including software publishing) stays in section J, now called “Publishing, broadcasting, and content production and distribution activities”. Divisions 61, 62 and 63 move to the new section K, “Telecommunication, computer programming, consulting, computing infrastructure and other information service activities”.

The practical effect: if you filter or report by section letter, a software publisher and a software developer no longer end up in the same bucket. A rule such as “section J = IT” has to be rewritten. The split, and the letter shift from K onwards, is explained in NACE Rev. 2 vs NACE Rev. 2.1: what changed.

From NACE Rev. 2 codes to Rev. 2.1

Most IT codes convert cleanly. The exceptions are the old hosting and web portal classes, which are split.

62.02 and 62.03 are merged into 62.20, so the old distinction between consultancy and facilities management disappears at EU level. For 63.11, the new code depends on the business. A pure hosting or data processing company goes to 63.10, a video streaming service to 60.20. How to read these links in general is covered in our guide to the NACE correspondence table.

Companies that do several things

A company gets one NACE code for its principal activity, the one that adds the most value. Many IT firms mix product sales, projects and support. NACE resolves this top-down: first the section with the largest share, then the division, the group and the class.

This matters more now that software publishing and programming are in different sections. Take a made-up company with 40% of its value added from its own SaaS product (58.29, section J), 35% from client projects (62.10) and 25% from consultancy (62.20). Section K has 60%, so it wins, even though the largest single activity is publishing. Within division 62, programming beats consultancy. The code is 62.10.

When value added per activity is not known, statistical offices may fall back on turnover or staff numbers, so the code on your register entry may differ from your own estimate.

National codes: NAF, ATECO, ÖNACE

National versions keep the NACE class and sometimes add detail. In France, NAF 2025 divides 62.20 into 62.20G (consulting on computer systems and software) and 62.20H (computer facilities management and maintenance of systems and applications), while 58.29, 62.10 and 63.10 each have a single subclass ending in Y. In Italy, ATECO 2025 splits 62.20 into 62.20.10 (computer consultancy) and 62.20.20 (computer facilities management), and 63.10 into infrastructure and hosting (63.10.10) and data processing (63.10.21, 63.10.29).

For your own business, the country pages help: NAF 2025 for France, ATECO 2025 for Italy and ÖNACE 2025 for Austria. To check which code a company already has on record, see how to find the NACE code of a company. The NACE Finder suggests the NACE Rev. 2.1 class for a short description of what the company does.