2020 Census Tract Relationship Files

I don't know when the tract files will be released (and it seems no one else on this forum does either!), but I can offer a couple other suggestions.

First, you might like to try posing your question on the U.S. Census Bureau's Slack workspace, accessible through their Developers page. Although it's framed as a "Developers' Forum," there are all kinds of Census-related questions asked there, and Census staff respond pretty regularly.

Second, you might be interested in using the block-to-block crosswalks from IPUMS NHGIS. Because blocks nest in tracts, and tract IDs even form the first part of block IDs, it's relatively straightforward to generate tract crosswalks from block crosswalks. There's also some guidance on the NHGIS page about how you could generate (e.g.) 2010 estimates for 2020 tracts directly using the block crosswalks, along with an explanation for why that's generally more accurate than directly allocating data from one year's tracts to another's.

Full disclosure: I'm the lead developer for these crosswalks. As such, I can also say that we're working on extending NHGIS time series to include 2020 data for 2010 tracts, which we hope to release in a month or two. Sometime after that, we'll also work on creating time series including 2010 data for 2020 tracts.

I don't know when the tract files will be released (and it seems no one else on this forum does either!), but I can offer a couple other suggestions.

First, you might like to try posing your question on the U.S. Census Bureau's Slack workspace, accessible through their Developers page. Although it's framed as a "Developers' Forum," there are all kinds of Census-related questions asked there, and Census staff respond pretty regularly.

Second, you might be interested in using the block-to-block crosswalks from IPUMS NHGIS. Because blocks nest in tracts, and tract IDs even form the first part of block IDs, it's relatively straightforward to generate tract crosswalks from block crosswalks. There's also some guidance on the NHGIS page about how you could generate (e.g.) 2010 estimates for 2020 tracts directly using the block crosswalks, along with an explanation for why that's generally more accurate than directly allocating data from one year's tracts to another's.

Full disclosure: I'm the lead developer for these crosswalks. As such, I can also say that we're working on extending NHGIS time series to include 2020 data for 2010 tracts, which we hope to release in a month or two. Sometime after that, we'll also work on creating time series including 2010 data for 2020 tracts.