Methodology

Every figure on StateDemographics.com comes from a single source: the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates, 2019–2023, retrieved directly from the Census Bureau's public API. This page explains what that dataset is, how we compute each metric you see, and where the honest limitations lie.

Why the ACS 5-Year Estimates?

The decennial census counts everyone but only asks a handful of questions once a decade. The ACS is the Census Bureau's ongoing survey program: roughly 3.5 million households respond every year, answering detailed questions about income, housing, education, and employment. The Bureau publishes two main products from it — 1-year estimates (current, but only for areas of 65,000+ people) and 5-year estimates, which pool sixty months of responses.

We use the 5-year product because it is the only dataset that covers every community in America, including towns of a few hundred residents. The trade-off is timing: pooled estimates describe the whole 2019–2023 period rather than a single year, so they lag sudden local changes such as a plant closure or a housing boom.

Census tables we use

• B01003 — Total population
• B01001 — Age by sex (used for the age distribution and age pyramid)
• B01002 — Median age
• B19013 — Median household income
• B19001 — Household income brackets
• B25077 — Median home value (owner-occupied homes, as estimated by their owners)
• B25003 — Housing tenure (owner- vs renter-occupied)
• B03002 — Hispanic or Latino origin by race
• B15003 — Educational attainment for adults 25 and older
• B17001 — Poverty status
• B23025 — Employment status for the population 16 and older

How derived metrics are computed

• Race & ethnicity shares follow the Census convention: "Hispanic or Latino" is an ethnicity of any race, and all other groups (White, Black, Asian, Native American, Pacific Islander, two or more races, some other race) count only non-Hispanic members. The eight shares sum to 100% of the population.
• Bachelor's degree or higher is the share of adults 25+ whose highest attainment is a bachelor's, master's, professional, or doctoral degree.
• Poverty rate is the share of people below the federal poverty threshold among those for whom poverty status is determined.
• Unemployment rate is unemployed persons divided by the civilian labor force, as measured by the ACS. Note that this is a 5-year survey average — it will differ from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' official monthly unemployment figures.
• Homeownership rate is owner-occupied units divided by all occupied housing units.
• Affordability ratio is median home value divided by median household income — the number of years of gross income a typical home represents. Around 3x has historically been considered comfortably affordable.
• Diversity index is a Simpson/Herfindahl-style measure: 1 minus the sum of the squared population shares of each racial and ethnic group, scaled 0–100. It equals the probability that two randomly chosen residents belong to different groups.

Top-coded values

The ACS caps ("top-codes") certain published medians: median household income at $250,001 and median home value at $2,000,001. A community at the cap has a true median at least that high — the ACS does not say how much higher. We display such values as $250,000+ and $2,000,000+, and rankings that include capped communities note that their order within the tie is not meaningful.

Margins of error and small communities

Every ACS estimate carries a margin of error, and the smaller the community, the wider it is. A median income for a town of 300 people may rest on a few dozen survey responses. We flag communities under 500 residents with an explicit data-quality note, and we apply minimum-population floors (1,000 residents for state-level city rankings, 50,000 for national city rankings) so that rankings are not dominated by statistical noise from tiny places. For published margins of error on any figure, consult data.census.gov.

Geography

Our "cities" are Census places: incorporated cities, towns, villages, and boroughs, plus Census-Designated Places (CDPs) — unincorporated communities the Bureau defines for statistical purposes. Counties include county equivalents such as Louisiana parishes, Alaska boroughs and census areas, and independent cities. A few notes:

• Places that span multiple counties are listed under a namesake county when one exists (New York City under New York County), otherwise under the most populous county they touch.
• Independent cities (all Virginia independent cities, Baltimore, St. Louis, Carson City, and the District of Columbia) are their own county equivalents and have no parent county.
• Connecticut replaced its eight counties with nine planning regions in 2022; the ACS reports Connecticut data by planning region.
• Page display names drop the Census entity-type suffix ("Boston city" is shown as "Boston"), but our CSV downloads keep the official Census names so they match Bureau sources exactly.

Update cadence

The Census Bureau releases new ACS 5-Year Estimates each December. We refresh the entire site — every state, county, and city page, plus all rankings and CSV downloads — after each annual release.

Citing this site

You are welcome to cite our pages. Please attribute figures as "U.S. Census Bureau, ACS 5-Year Estimates (2019–2023), via StateDemographics.com." For term definitions, see the glossary; for questions or corrections, see the contact page.