Census Research Guide: Raw Data

The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS-USA) consists of more than fifty high-precision samples of the American population drawn from 15 federal censuses and from the American Community Surveys of 2000-2010. Also includes IPUMS Complete Count Data (1790-1940), a collaboration between IPUMS and the nation's two largest genealogical organizations—Ancestry.com and FamilySearch—to provide anonymized person-level microdata for 1850-1940 and, due to how earlier censuses were recorded, household-level microdata data for 1790-1840.

Provides easy access to summary tables and time series of population, housing, agriculture, and economic data, along with GIS-compatible boundary files, for years from 1790 through the present and for all levels of U.S. census geography, including states, counties, tracts, and blocks.

ICPSR archives and disseminates census data acquired from the United States Census Bureau as well as files prepared by ICPSR and other principal investigators. Both microdata and aggregate data constitute ICPSR's census holdings. The microdata comprise individual responses to census questions while the aggregate data contain tabulations of the individual responses at various aggregate levels of observation such as states, counties, places, and census tracts.

These are public-use samples randomly selected from all of data collected by a census. ICPSR has microdata from the censuses of 2000, 1990, 1980, 1970, 1960, 1950, 1940, and some earlier censuses, with sampling fractions ranging from 10 to 0.01 percent.

San Diego and California data, for 1970 & 1980 census.