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 7,288 districts in Indonesia as of 2023, subdivided into 83,971 administrative villages (rural desa and urban kelurahan).[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.