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American Community Survey (ACS)

Summary File Documentation

The American Community Survey (ACS) Summary File is a set of comma-delimited text files that contain all of the Detailed Tables for the ACS 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year data releases. Summary File estimates, margins of error, and geography files for each release are available via the Summary File Data page.

The Detailed Tables are stored in a series of files with only the data from the tables and without such information as the table title, description of the rows, or geographic identifiers. That information is located in other files that the user must merge with the data files to reproduce full tables.

Starting with the 2009-2013 ACS 5-year data release, block groups, the lowest level of geography published by the ACS, are available in American FactFinder. For earlier years, block groups are available only in the ACS 5-year Summary File.

2017
  • 2017
  • 2016
  • 2015
  • 2014
  • 2013
  • 2012
  • 2011
  • 2010
  • 2009
  • 2008
  • 2007
  • 2006
  • 2005
2017

Technical Document

Core technical document contains information about how to use the ACS Summary File

pdf   2017 Core Tech Doc   [1.0 MB]

Appendices include the sequence number and restrictions for all tables, as well as summary levels available for each release

xls   1-year Appendices   [<1.0 MB]
xls   5-year Appendices   [<1.0 MB]

Summary File User Tools

Table Shells

Contains table ID, line number, unique ID (table ID + Line Number), stub, and data release

xls   Table Shells   [2.3 MB]

Sequence Number/Table Number Lookup File

Contains information on the relationship between the sequences and the tables

1-year Lookup File

zip   SAS format   [11 MB]
xls   Excel format   [4.7 MB]
txt   Text format   [1.8 MB]

5-year Lookup File

zip   SAS format   [8.8 MB]
xls   Excel format   [1.5 MB]
txt   Text format   [1.1 MB]

Simplified Geography Files

Contains basic geography information, including LOGRECNO, GEOID, and name, in an Excel file with tabs for the US, as well as each state or state equivalent.  Compared to the standard geography files in .csv and .txt format, these simplified files contain only the geography variables needed to read the ACS Summary File into Excel.

SAS Programs

Contains SAS programs for each sequence per state, which can be used to convert each estimate and margin of error into SAS Datasets with table stubs

zip   1-year SAS programs   [41.0 MB]
zip   5-year SAS programs   [33.7 MB]

Detailed example SAS program containing SAS macros which access the geography, estimate and margin of error data. It creates one table for all geographies from the ACS Summary File. Segments of the SAS codes can be used to convert geography files into SAS datasets

txt   1-Year Macros   [<1.0 MB]
txt   5-Year Macros   [<1.0 MB]
pdf   Users Guide   [3.2 MB]

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