Census Bureau to release Vintage 2025 estimates after major methodological updates

The U.S. Census Bureau will publish its Vintage 2025 population estimates next week, and agency staff described several substantive methodological changes that users should expect to affect state and county totals as well as demographic characteristics.

"Today I'm going to be talking about methodology updates for the vintage 2025 estimates," Eric Jensen, senior research scientist for population estimates and coverage measurement, said during a public webinar previewing the release. Jensen said the Vintage 2025 release will cover the period from April 1, 2020, through July 1, 2025, and will include an updated time series of annual July 1 population values.

Why it matters: Census population estimates are widely used as controls for surveys such as the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey, as denominators for public-health rates produced by the National Center for Health Statistics, and for program and planning decisions across federal, state, and local governments. Methodological shifts can therefore change the baseline counts used in many downstream analyses.

Major changes described

- New base file (MARC): Jensen said the agency is replacing the decade’s blended-base approach with a Modified Age and Race Census (MARC) base file built from 2020 Census data that have been reallocated into the race categories used by the Population Estimates Program and smoothed to address "age keeping" (age heaping). The MARC file lets the program use 2020 race and age distributions directly for the…