Lifetime Citizen Portal Access — AI Briefings, Alerts & Unlimited Follows
Census webinar: American Community Survey is the U.S. government’s annual source of community data
Loading...
Summary
Maryann McKay of the U.S. Census Bureau explained how the American Community Survey (ACS) produces annual social, economic, housing and demographic estimates, described sampling and margins of error, and outlined the ACS release schedule and new topics coming in 2026.
Maryann McKay, who identified herself as a member of the American Community Survey Office at the U.S. Census Bureau, opened a recorded webinar by describing the ACS as “the premier source of detailed information about the nation’s people and group quarter residents.”
The ACS is a continuous household survey that produces annual estimates used by federal, state and local governments, planners, businesses, nonprofits and researchers. McKay said the survey’s estimates inform how trillions of dollars in federal funds are distributed and support more than 300 known federal uses and countless local applications.
Why it matters: ACS estimates let officials and planners track social and economic trends without waiting a decade for decennial results. McKay emphasized that ACS estimates are sampling-based and therefore include margins of error; the Census Bureau reports MOEs at a 90% confidence level on data.census.gov.
Key details from the webinar:
- Scope and method: McKay said the ACS contacts roughly 3,500,000 housing-unit addresses each year by random selection. Households can respond online, by mail or by computer-assisted field interview; nonresponse follow-up is used for a subsample. McKay noted each address has about a 1-in-480 chance of selection in a month and that no address should be selected more often than once every five years.
- Data and topics: The ACS collects social, economic, demographic and housing characteristics (for example, education, commuting patterns, age, race and housing tenure). McKay noted more than 40 topics are included and that the ACS produces more than 1,000 data tables for communities.
- New topics: McKay said new housing-related topics added in 2025 include electric vehicles, solar panels and public sewer connectivity; she said data for those topics are planned for release in 2026.
- Product cadence and thresholds: The Bureau publishes three main ACS products—1-year, 1-year supplemental and 5-year estimates. McKay summarized availability thresholds (1-year: geographies with populations of 65,000 or more; 1-year supplemental: geographies with populations of 20,000 or more) and the typical release schedule. She gave planned dates for the upcoming cycle: Sept. 11 for the 1-year release, Oct. 16 for the 1-year supplemental release and Dec. 11 for the 2019–2024 5-year release.
McKay also walked through the historical reasoning behind the ACS, explaining that demand for current, nationally consistent data led policymakers to adopt an annually administered survey in the 1990s, with full implementation in 2005.
The webinar recording, slides and a suite of guidance documents are posted by the Census Bureau; McKay invited users to consult technical documentation for definitions, code lists and instructions for applying statistical testing to ACS estimates. The session closed with contact information for ACS user support and an invitation to join the ACS data users group.
