American Community Survey
research program of the U.S. Census Bureau
The American Community Survey (ACS) is an annual demographics survey program conducted by the United States Census Bureau. It regularly gathers information previously contained only in the long form of the decennial census, including ancestry, US citizenship status, educational attainment, income, language proficiency, migration, disability, employment, and housing characteristics. None of the respondents' personal information is released, and it is only used statistically in these data, which are used by many public-sector, private-sector, and not-for-profit stakeholders to allocate funding, track shifting demographics, plan for emergencies, and learn about local communities.
Sent to approximately 295,000 addresses monthly, or 3.5 million addresses annually, it is the largest household survey that the Census Bureau administers.
The American Community Survey gathers information annually in the 50 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. Data is also collected in Puerto Rico via the Puerto Rico Community Survey (PRCS), which is part of the ACS. It does not gather information on the other four major U.S. Island areas: American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean, and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean Sea.
History
Article I, Section II of the Constitution of the United States of 1787, adopted in 1788, requires an enumeration of the population every ten years "in such Manner as they (Congress) shall by Law direct". From the first United States decennial census three years later in 1790, congressional legislators understood that it should also collect basic demographic information beyond just the number of people in the household. James Madison, an American Founding Father and the fourth president of the United States, first proposed including additional questions in the U.S. decennial census to "enable them to adapt the public measures to the particular circumstances of the community". Such knowledge collected with each census, President Madison argued, "would give them an opportunity of marking the progress of the society". The questions included in censuses since 1790 have reflected American understandings of and concerns about societal trends and the growing nation's expanded data needs.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “American Community Survey” is research program of the U.S. Census Bureau. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through American, Community and Survey, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q463769. VIAF identifies the subject as 4450147665823160670002. The Library of Congress control number is no2016124713. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1787, 1788 and 1790.
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This entry incorporates text from “American Community Survey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.