: For information on the company called UserLand, see UserLand Software.

Userland refers to an application space, typically in Unix or Unix-like operating systems which are external from the kernel (computer science). Sometimes userland can mean an application which performs its own system calls or input and output (IO), but typically the userland part of an application will request system calls and other system activities from the kernel.

In the filesystem hierarchical sense, userland means any storage space on the system disk which is not a part of the critical system storage, ie. it is meant for users space storage such as their personal documents and other non critical data. In Unix systems this space can typically reside in the /home, /export/home, or /usr/home directories.

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