The district (Category C) municipalities are municipalities that are comprised of local (Category B) municipalities. The Metropolitan (Category A) Municipalities are municipalities with the major cities as the core (e.g. City of Johannesburg) and they are outside the District Municipalities. When the boundaries of local municipalities change and affect the boundary of district municipalities, the new district municipal boundary is generated. In the District Municipalities 2018 shapefile there are 44 District Municipalities and 8 Metropolitan Municipalities. Note that Metropolitan Municipalities are included in the District Municipalities shapefile to ensure that the layer is continuous throughout the country. If the Metropolitan Municipalities were left out, there will be void spaces in the layer.

The topology of the features has been checked to eliminate duplications of vertices and ensure the integrity of the feature geometry. The projection of the feature class is Geographic (Lat/Lon)and if one has to calculate the area of features, it must be transformed to UTM Projection and metres be used as units of measurements.