As of 31 January 2026 we will no longer be supporting the Humanitarian Exchange Language (HXL) standard and tools related to the HDX platform. HXL was created over a decade ago as a simple standard for messy data, with a primary focus on combining spreadsheets. As technology and our humanitarian data ecosystem has advanced, we are exploring new ways to standardize data, improve interoperability and speed up data processing across data sources.

As a result of this decision, the following services will be retired:

  • hxlstandard.org – the HXL standard website
  • proxy.hxlstandard.org – an online data transformation tool for HXL-tagged data
  • HDX Quick Charts – dataset charts from HXL-tagged data

For organizations that use HXL tags in data on HDX, these changes will have no impact on their data. There is also no risk that the pipelines will break after removing HXL tags. With the removal of Quick Charts, we will no longer be asking data contributors to add HXL tags to datasets shared on HDX.

HXL is an open standard and will remain available for organizations that wish to continue using it within their internal workflows. Archives of both the HXL Standard site and the HXL proxy site will remain accessible for anyone looking for information. If your organization is interested in maintaining the standard and related infrastructure going forward, please contact us.

We are grateful to all of our partners and data contributors that tried HXL and provided feedback over the years. The need to standardize data for analysis of humanitarian operations remains. We will build on the lessons from HXL as we implement solutions for data integration.

If you have any questions or comments about these changes, get in touch at hdx@un.org.