A district electoral division (DED; ) is a former name given to a low-level territorial division in Ireland. In 1994, both district electoral divisions and wards (the equivalent of district electoral divisions within the five county boroughs) were renamed as electoral divisions (the boundaries and names of the DEDs and wards themselves remained unchanged). In the Republic of Ireland, DEDs are the smallest legally defined administrative areas in the state for which small area population statistics (SAPS) are published from the Census. In the European Union, Local administrative units (LAUs) are basic components of Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) regions. For each EU member country, two levels of Local Administrative Units (LAU) are defined: LAU-1 and LAU-2, which were previously called NUTS-4 and NUTS-5 respectively, until the NUTS regulation went into force in July 2003. The District electoral division is at the level of LAU-2. There are a total of 3,440 electoral divisions within the Republic of Ireland.