5 American Community Survey (ACS)
5.3 Description
- Collects information about social characteristics (e.g. education, marital status, relationships, fertility), economic characteristics (e.g. income, employment, occupation), housing characteristics (e.g. occupancy and structure, housing value and costs, utilities), and demographic characteristics (e.g. sex, age, race, Hispanic origin)
- Used to explore the social and economic needs of communities (e.g. schools, hospital, emergency services)
5.5 Observational Unit
People or households (micro files) or geographic area (census block to national)
5.6 Collection Methodology
- Two sampling frames (housing unit addresses and residents of group quarters facilities) derived from the Census Bureau’s Master Address File
- Multi-phase, multi-stage sampling approach
- Have 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year files available where the multi-year files have been adjusted for weighting and inflation adjustment factors
5.7 Available at
- Summaries by geographic area can be downloaded at https://data.census.gov/
- Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) files can be downloaded at https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/microdata/access.html
5.8 User Guide/Data Dictionary
- Handbooks: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/guidance/handbooks.html
- Technical documentation: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/technical-documentation.html
5.12 Special Notes
- Some data tables also accessible via API; for information go to:
- List data sets/years available as well as variables: https://api.census.gov/data.html
- List of all data sets and years available by API: https://www.census.gov/data/developers/data-sets.html
- Instructions for developers: https://www.census.gov/data/developers.html
- Select summary tables available at https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/data/data-tables.html
- Data prior to ~2005 typically needs to be downloaded from an FTP server