Districts of Indonesia

In Indonesia, district is the third-level administrative subdivision, below regency or city.^[1][2][3][4] The local term kecamatan is used in the majority of Indonesian areas. The term distrik is used in provinces in Papua. In the Special Region of Yogyakarta, the term kapanewon is used for districts within the regencies, while the term kemantren is used for districts within Yogyakarta, the province's only city.^[5] According to Statistics Indonesia, there are a total of 7,252 districts in Indonesia as at 2019, subdivided into 83,820 administrative villages (rural desa and urban kelurahan). An average number of districts in the provinces of Indonesia is 190 districts, with an average area of 262.62 km² (101.40 sq mi), and an average population of about 38,488 people.^[6]

During the Dutch East Indies and early republic period, the term district referred to kewedanan, a subdivision of regency, while kecamatan was translated as subdistrict (Dutch: onderdistrict).^[7] Following the abolition of kewedanan, the term district began to be associated with kecamatan which has since been directly administered by regency. Mainstream media such as The Jakarta Post,^[8][9][10] Kompas,^[11][12][13] and Tempo^{[14][15][16][17]} use "district" to refer to kecamatan; however machine translation services like Google Translate often incorrectly uses "district" to refer to regencies instead.