On January 21, the U.S. Census Bureau released the five-year Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) file for the 2010-2014 American Community Survey (ACS). The Census Bureau makes PUMS files available to the public each year so that researchers can more closely analyze the ACS data. The ACS PUMS files, now available via American FactFinder, contain ACS records for a sample of individual housing units. Users can employ PUMS data to run custom tabulations of the ACS that are not available from tables that the Census produces.
The ACS is an annual survey of more than 3.5 million housing units that includes questions about the housing unit and the occupying household’s social, demographic, and economic characteristics. One year of PUMS data does not provide a large enough sample to study areas smaller than 65,000 residents. The five-year PUMS includes five years of data to provide a sample large enough to examine small communities.
Data documentation for the latest PUMS file are at http://1.usa.gov/1Pr0fKI
The files can be downloaded at http://1.usa.gov/17L5tmx