The American Community Survey is an ongoing survey from the US Census Bureau. In this survey, approximately 3.5 million households per year are asked detailed questions about who they are and how they live. Many topics are covered, including ancestry, education, work, transportation, internet use, and residency.

The responses reveal a fascinating, granular snapshot into the lives of many Americans.

We''re publishing this data on scripts to make it easy for you to explore this rich dataset, share your work, and collaborate with other data scientists. No data download or local environment needed! We''ve also added shapefiles to simplify publishing maps.

What surprising insights can you find in this data? We look forward to seeing and sharing what you discover on scripts!

Data Description

Here''s a data dictionary.

There are two types of survey data provided, housing and population.

For the housing data, each row is a housing unit, and the characteristics are properties like rented vs. owned, age of home, etc.

For the population data, each row is a person and the characteristics are properties like age, gender, whether they work, method/length of commute, etc.

Each data set is divided in two pieces, "a" and "b" (where "a" contains states 1 to 25 and "b" contains states 26 to 50).

Both data sets have weights associated with them. Weights are included to account for the fact that individuals are not sampled with equal probably (people who have a greater chance of being sampled have a lower weight to reflect this).

• Weight variable for the housing data: WGTP

• Weight variable for the population data: PWGTP