What does Section H cover in ISIC Rev. 5?

Section H in ISIC Rev. 5, published by the UN Statistics Division, covers transportation and storage: moving people and goods by land, water and air, storing goods, supporting transport operations, and postal and courier services. It groups activities by mode of transport and by supporting function, so a railway operator, a shipping line, an airline, a warehouse and a courier service all sit in one broad section with different narrower homes. The section describes movement and storage as services, not the manufacture of vehicles or the construction of roads and ports. This guide describes the grouping only.

Which journeys and storage jobs sit inside Section H?

Section H, in ISIC Rev. 5 published by the UN Statistics Division, gathers five kinds of service under one broad heading:

• Land transport and transport via pipelines
• Water transport
• Air transport
• Warehousing and support activities for transportation
• Postal and courier activities

The thread joining them is movement or storage offered as a service. A railway operator moves passengers along tracks. A shipping line moves goods across water. An airline moves people and cargo through the air. A warehouse holds goods between journeys. A courier carries parcels from sender to recipient. Different vehicles, different cargoes, and different distances all belong here when the service itself is the moving or the holding of something for someone else.

Where does a bus route, a port warehouse and a parcel round each belong?

Take three familiar operations in turn. A bus company running scheduled routes keeps to a timetable, stops at set points, and carries passengers in vehicles it operates. Its work is land passenger movement, and the timetable is part of the service, not an extra. A port warehouse receives goods unloaded from ships, stores them under cover, and releases them when onward transport is ready. No route is travelled by the warehouse itself, yet storage is the service sold, so it sits in the same broad section for a different reason. A courier service collects parcels, sorts them at a depot, and delivers them to homes and businesses along a daily round. The parcels are small and the network is dense, but the job is still movement from sender to recipient.

Putting the three side by side shows why Section H needs narrower homes inside it. The bus, the warehouse and the courier share a section, but they do not share a division or a class, because the mode differs in the first case, the service differs in the second, and the delivery model differs in the third. A reader who stops at the section letter will miss those splits, and the splits are where the description starts to be useful.

What sits outside the section even when it looks close?

Building a road, making a lorry, and selling a ticket as a pure arranging service are described elsewhere in ISIC Rev. 5, published by the UN Statistics Division. Construction builds the infrastructure that transport uses. Manufacturing makes the vehicle that transport operates. Arranging brings buyer and operator together without operating the journey. None of those is the transport or storage operation itself, even though each is closely tied to it in everyday business.

Real firms often cross these lines in daily work. A company might run lorries and also operate its own warehouse, or store goods for others while arranging onward shipping through partners. Crossing a line is not an error. It simply means the firm performs more than one described activity, and each activity is described where Rev. 5 places it. The full class descriptions, read side by side, show where one description ends and the next begins.

How do the levels below the section narrow the picture?

ISIC Rev. 5, the UN Statistics Division publication for section h, progresses from broad sections to narrow classes. The section behind section h gives the broad field, its division narrows it, its group narrows it further, and its class describes a specific kind of activity. Reading a code for section h therefore means working through each level in turn, rather than guessing from the section letter alone. National versions may add further detail below the class, but the international structure provides the shared frame for statistics.

The list at the start of this guide names the parts of Section H, but it is not a substitute for the full class description. If an activity seems to fit a heading but not the detail, the detail in the Rev. 5 publication should prevail.

This guide is a map of Section H, not a verdict on any business, route, or shipment. It explains a statistical grouping only, and it does not settle any reader’s code, principal activity, or registration. Anyone who needs a formal entry should confirm it with the national statistical institute or business register that holds the record, using the UN Statistics Division classification detail and the ISIC Rev. 5 publication listed in the frontmatter as the sources for every code statement here.