Obtain American Community Survey Summary File Data Tables from Census Bureau FTP Site
Source:R/ACSdownload-package.R
ACSdownload.RdTHIS PACKAGE MAY BE MOSTLY OBSOLETE NOW THAT SOME CRAN PACKAGES OFFER MOST OF THESE TOOLS.
Details
ACSdownload is an R package that helps you download and parse huge raw data from the Census Bureau American Community Survey 5-year Summary Files, providing demographic data at the block and tract levels of resolution. You can obtain data from the entire USA all at once using this package, for one or more tables. Some key functions are
get.acs(),set.needed(), andnhgis(). Also see data(lookup.acs2022).The (tidycensus package)https://walker-data.com/tidycensus/index.html makes it easy to download some ACS or decennial census or other data, (once you get a Census Bureau API key to request the data), but downloading via API is slow/awkward if you want all blockgroups nationwide.
Also, there was a package called totalcensus that tried to offer tools to download ACS5yr tables, but as of 8/2025 that package had not been updated since 12/2023, and the late 2023 version did not work out of the box. The CRAN version of totalcensus was older than the github version of totalcensus
devtools::install_github("GL-Li/totalcensus")The Census Bureau makes it easy to obtain data from one state at a time, not every block group in the US. There are over 240,000 block groups and over 85,000 tracts in the U.S.
HOWEVER, THE DATA FORMAT HAS CHANGED FOR SUMMARY FILE ACS DATA:
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/data/summary-file/updates-to-acs-summary-file.Overview.html
Several options for obtaining Census ACS data are now listed here:
http://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/data.html
Limits on downloads via American Fact Finder, not all US tracts at once are noted here: https://ask.census.gov/faq.php?id=5000&faqId=1653
Other data sources that may be relevant include Census geodatabases at
http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-data.html and data at
http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/gazetteer.html.