Skip to contents

Download American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year Data Tables from Census Bureau nationwide in bulk

Source: R/ACSdownload-package.R
ACSdownload.Rd

Download and parse raw data from the Census Bureau American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year survey, to get demographic data in bulk (without relying on the API). You can obtain data from the entire USA all at once (or selected FIPS), for one or more tables. This package is focused on blockgroup and tract levels of resolution.

Details

  • ACSdownload is an R package that helps you download and parse large amounts of raw data from the Census Bureau American Community Survey 5-year datasets, providing demographic data at the blockgroup and tract levels of resolution. You can obtain data from the entire USA all at once using this package, for one or more tables.

The key function is get_acs_new() for ACS 2018-2022, 2019-2023, or 2020-2024.

For older data, which was offered in summary file sequence files not by table, see get_acs_old().

  • 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.

  • The tidycensus package is an alternative that makes it easy to download modest amounts of 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 for multiple tables.

  • 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")

For 5-year data ending with year 2022, the DATA FORMAT HAS CHANGED FOR SUMMARY FILE ACS DATA. See https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/data/summary-file/updates-to-acs-summary-file.Overview.html

Several other options for obtaining Census ACS data are 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

References

https://ejanalysis.org

See also

Useful links:

Author

info@ejanalysis.com