The US Census provides many kinds of data (population, income, age, etc.) grouped by many kinds of geographic units (census block, tract, city, urban cluster, etc.). I have not been able to find a comprehensive list saying which combinations of these are available. That is, something that looks like this:

  • Total Population data is available for each
    • block
    • block group
    • etc.
  • Income data is available for each
    • tract
    • urban cluster
    • etc.

I can imagine there might be a separate such list for each census data source (e.g., 2010 Census, 2012 American Community Survey, whatever).

Does such a list (or lists) exist, giving a complete statement of exactly which values are available for which geographies?


This page is pretty helpful: http://api.census.gov/data.html

Dataset name, description, link to geography list, link to variables list, documentation, API url, API examples.

You can't exactly see all variables/geography combinations at once in a machine-readable way, but it's a good start.

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  • That's a good resource, but it's not complete. It's just what is available for the API, which doesn't include much of the CPS, or any of the SIPP... for talks I've given I've come up with a list of at least 18 different data products that the Census Bureau provides (Decennial, ACS, CPS, SIPP and more than a dozen others) – Joe Germuska Dec 2 '15 at 16:10

Census produces their "TIGER" products for each geographic level they delineate - http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger.html.

Due to shear size of serving the data - they have traditionally separated the geography files (TIGER) from the Census/Demographics/ACS data they collect; with this they provide instructions on how to perform a "spatial join" so users could derive/create-their-own products which ever data/geography they desired. However if you are looking for what datasets are already "pre-packaged" with Demographic data then you can review Census's "TIGER/Line® with Selected Demographic and Economic Data" - http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-data.html

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