10 public sources of downloadable demographic data

By Laura Kurtzberg, IRE & NICAR

Many government datasets that were once public and available on the internet are either being taken down or no longer updated. So what’s a data journalist to do?

In a recent IRE training, a participant asked about downloading a table from the US Census American Community Survey. Census.gov was home to a large banner at the time that read “Due to the lapse of federal funding, portions of this website will not be updated. Any inquiries submitted will not be answered until appropriations are enacted.” The Census page has since returned to normal, but at the time the trainee was stumped.

The best course of action for many of us in a similar predicament is to rely on our community of fellow journalists. Another participant, fearing the loss of important government datasets, had downloaded 2023 American Community Survey data and saved it on their hard drive. They were able to help their fellow trainee that day and send them the data they needed for their story. And this journalistic generosity, thankfully, isn’t all that rare.

For journalists that are comfortable using the US Census API (application programming interface – a set of rules that allows different software applications to communicate and share data with each other), calls were still working during the government shutdown. It was still possible to request an API key and activate it.  For those who haven’t used the API before, IRE has plenty of resources on using tools like tidycensus (R package) or CensusDIS (Python package) which make using the API easier. To check when data are updated or removed from the APIs, Hannah Recht’s Census Dataset Changes Tracker can be a crucial help.

And even though the Census website is back up, the possibility of it going dark is more real than we might want to admit. Thankfully, there are other ways to access demographic data through an online interface. 

Here’s my list of commonly used, free and public sources of US Census data and other demographic datasets, which may be useful to journalists even now that we have recuperated access to the census.gov download tools.

1. IPUMS – One of the most detailed sources of Census data for not only the United States, but some other countries as well, IPUMS is often the first resource I go to for demographic information, especially when I need data linked to geographic Shapefiles. Readers may need to study the metadata that accompanies the download to better understand the unfamiliar column headers. Check out this great set of slides from a 2025 NICAR session (by Sandhya Kambhampati, Paul Overberg, David Van Riper and MaryJo Webster) on using IPUMS data for reporting.

2. Census Reporter – Made by journalists for journalists, Census Reporter is a friendly way to search through complex tables. For example, to find out which ACS table includes information that can help answer the question “How many people have college degrees in Cleveland?” exploring the Cleveland, OH page will reveal this information in the “educational attainment” section. This four-minute long video is a good introduction to using the tool. 

3. Headwaters Economics – This nonprofit research group publishes detailed reports and downloadable Excel files including Census demographic data along with information about wildfire risk, socioeconomic trends, and at-risk neighborhoods most vulnerable to climate change. Their at-risk neighborhoods tool also provides a Shapefile download option.

4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics – BLS programs provide information on some demographic characteristics of people in the United States, including employment status and earning broken down by sex, age, and race. Although employment numbers have not been released for October and December of 2025, demographic information from the 2023 ACS is still available. As a bonus, many maps on the site can be downloaded as SVG files and edited to create custom visualizations.

5. Annual Survey of Public Employment & Payroll – As part of their Investigate This! Series, The Marshall Project has put together a guide and tool to explore the Census’ Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll data. Although their guide focuses on prison staffing trends, their tool on Observable includes data for all government sectors, updated up to 2024. 

6. CDC National Center for Health Statistics – Health and demographic data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) is available for download through interactive summary table apps (built with R Shiny) for adults, teens, and children. The latest data release covers 2024. There are many demographic groupings available, including variables like age, sexual orientation, whether people live in urban versus rural areas, and health insurance coverage.

7. Incarcerated Populations Demographics (2023) – This original dataset curated from public sources on prison demographics across all 50 states and the District of Columbia was put together collaboratively by a team of researchers from the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at Harvard University, Yale University, the Santa Fe Institute, MIT, and Northeastern University. The dataset includes the monthly number of people, by race/ethnicity, in each prison system.

8. Income Distributions and Dynamics in America (1998-2019) – From a combination of confidential Census Bureau records and IRS tax forms, this joint research project between Census Bureau and Minneapolis Fed’s Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute staff provides historical time series data on income disparities. You can find the data categorized by state, and some demographic data breakdowns by race/ethnicity, sex, US/foreign-born status, and age group, but unfortunately the most recent data is 6 years old.

9. Pew Research Center – Although the Pew Research Center doesn’t host US Census data, their research team collects and shares survey data on US and world trends, opinions, and religious composition. A free account is required to download data tables in CSV format. Many of their datasets are recently updated for 2025.

10. Our World in Data – Another alternate source of demographic data, Our World in Data provides downloadable data about the entire world from sources like the 2024 UN World Population Prospects and the 2025 UN Population Division. These sources allow reporters to compare the United States with other countries, and to download figures that are more recent than the 2023 Census data. Most of the charts on the Our World in Data website can also be embedded freely, with attribution.