The main result here is a characterisation of binary 2-neighbour-transitive codes with minimum distance at least 5 via their minimal subcodes, which are found to be generated by certain designs. The motivation for studying this class of codes comes primarily from their relationship to the class of completely regular codes. The results contained here yield many more examples of 2-neighbour-transitive codes than previous classification results of families of 2-neighbour-transitive codes. In the process, new lower bounds on the minimum distance of particular sub-families are produced. Several results on the structure of 2-neighbour-transitive codes with arbitrary alphabet size are also proved. The proofs of the main results apply the classification of minimal and pre-minimal submodules of the permutation modules over F 2 for finite 2-transitive permutation groups. * The first author sincerely thanks Michael Giudici for reading first drafts of this work and is grateful for the support of an Australian Research Training Program Scholarship and a University of Western Australia Safety-Net Top-Up Scholarship. The research forms part of Australian Research Council Project FF0776186.1. (X, s)-neighbour-transitive if X acts transitively on each of the sets C, C 1 , . . . , C s , 2. X-neighbour-transitive if C is (X, 1)-neighbour-transitive, 3. X-completely transitive if C is (X, ρ)-neighbour-transitive, and, 4. s-neighbour-transitive, neighbour-transitive, or completely transitive, respectively, if C is (Aut(C), s)-neighbour-transitive, Aut(C)-neighbour-transitive, or Aut(C)-completely transitive, respectively.A variant of the above concept of complete transitivity was introduced for linear codes by Solé [33], with the above definition first appearing in [23]. Note that non-linear completely transitive codes do indeed exist; see [22]. Completely transitive codes form a subfamily of completely regular codes, and s-neighbour transitive codes are a sub-family of s-regular codes, for each s. It is hoped that studying 2-neighbour-transitive codes will lead to a better understanding of completely transitive and completely regular codes. Indeed a classification of 2-neighbour-transitive codes would have as a corollary a classification of completely transitive codes.The main result of the present paper, stated below, provides a characterisation of binary 2-neighbour-transitive codes with minimum distance at least 5. Theorem 1.2. Let C be a binary code in H(m, 2) with minimum distance at least 5. Then C is 2-neighbour-transitive if and only if one of the following holds: