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Start dates for ACS tables

jnigrine
16 days ago

Does anyone know of a resource to find the start dates for one-year and five-year ACS tables?  For example, S1502 had its first year with one- and five-year data in 2015, B01001 in 2010. S2801 had its first with one-year data in 2015, and 5-year data in 2017.

I'm looking for a way to find those dates for arbitrary tables in bulk without having to pull them up one at a time in data.census.gov.

Thanks -

Jon

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  • 4 days ago

    The database is available in html json and xml formats.  Here is the link to the html

    https://api.census.gov/data.html

    The mail web page is:

    https://www.census.gov/data/developers/updates/new-discovery-tool.html

    You will need a package/program to read the database in one of the above format. As noted earlier the R censusapi package has a function that can download the database as an R "data.frame." you can the save it in a tab delimited file and read it into Excel.

    Dave

  • 2 days ago in reply to David Dorer

    Thank you, Dave!

    What I find in those tables is text like this:

    The American Community Survey (ACS) is an ongoing survey that provides data every year -- giving communities the current information they need to plan investments and services. The ACS covers a broad range of topics about social, economic, demographic, and housing characteristics of the U.S. population. The subject tables include the following geographies: nation, all states (including DC and Puerto Rico), all metropolitan areas, all congressional districts, all counties, all places and all tracts. Subject tables provide an overview of the estimates available in a particular topic. The data are presented as both counts and percentages. There are over 66,000 variables in this dataset.

    I'm hoping to find data showing individual tables and the period they were first issued, e.g., B28012 first has five-year data in 2020 and one-year data in 2021.

    Any thoughts?

  • 2 days ago in reply to jnigrine

    Dear Jon,

    What I do is use is the R package censusapi.  For the ACS vintage and period and table type (B,S,DP,C etc) you can download the metadata for each combination using the R function:

    listCensusMetadata(name=name,vintage=vintage,type="variables")

    Use the R function that downloads all the apis - see earlier reply - to get the relevant vintage and period then "loop" over all the combinations.

    If you work for a non-profit (501(c)(3)) or government entity, I can probably find time to make up a data base for you with each table "group" the starting a ending vintage with 1 row in the spreadsheet for all the ACS tables that existed from 2010 to the latest vintage.

    Sorry that I wasn't careful when I read your original post.

    info@dorerfoundation.org

    Dave

  • 1 day ago in reply to jnigrine

    I am testing a feature for my Census reports that takes any table and pulls data from 2010 to the present all measures all years (ACS1 or ACS5) it includes the measure names and if the measure name is diff from prior year the text is in red. You can pull US, State, County, or tract. It takes about 45 seconds. I think it will be helpful and hope to update the server this weekend. 

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