2016-2020 American Community Survey 5-year data released

Posted on Mar 17, 2022 in Featured, Main, Whats New Releases

March 17, 2022. The U.S. Census Bureau released the 2016-2020 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates today. The Census Bureau’s press release is available here.

Collection of 2020 data was impacted by the pandemic, and the Census Bureau took additional time to confirm that the data met their standards for release. As a result, the Census Bureau made changes to their methodology which revised how housing units were weighed to mitigate nonresponse bias (i.e., lack of responses from respondents during the 2020 survey period).

Available in these estimates are data for smaller areas such as census tracts, ZIP codes, and Hawaiian home lands. The 2016-2020 ACS release includes new geographic boundaries for census blocks and block groups, census tracts, county subdivisions, census designated places, and ZIP code tabulation areas.

Accompanying this ACS release is a new Census Bureau visualization that describes topics by county. Topics that can be explored with this visualization include age, commuters, education and more.

The ACS 5-year estimates are averages over the five year period being measured, and the estimates are not meant to measure rapid change from a short period of time. Although the data contain recent estimates regarding the changes and hardships Hawaii faced in 2020, the bulk of the data providing the averages are from 2016-2019. Thus, these data only reflect a small part of the impact that the pandemic had on social, economic, and housing measures.

Data for Hawaii, including data for census tracts, census designated places, counties, and county subdivisions, are available on our DBEDT site. Additionally, highlights from the data and census tract ranking tables are available.