Neighborhood-level demographics, housing stock analysis, age structure, and equity metrics — from the national level down to the census tract. Block group data coming soon.
CensusGo pulls live from the Census Bureau's ACS 5-Year API. Here's an honest summary of what geographic levels are available, what's coming, and what requires GIS software.
All tabular data pulls live from api.census.gov. Spatial boundaries (shapefiles) require TIGER — see the GIS section below.
Select a state and county to load every census tract as a sortable table — population, income, poverty, housing, racial diversity, and median age. Click any tract row to see its full profile.
Comprehensive housing stock analysis for any county or place — tenure, vacancy, cost burden, age of housing, and ownership vs. rental market balance.
Understanding age distribution is essential for planning schools, senior services, transit demand, and housing types. Compare any state or county to national benchmarks.
From comprehensive plan updates to equity analyses and grant applications, census data is at the core of evidence-based planning practice.
Establish existing conditions baselines for population, household size, income distribution, and housing stock. Track change between ACS vintages to project future needs.
Identify disadvantaged communities using poverty rates, minority population share, and linguistic isolation. Required for federal grant compliance (NEPA, Title VI) and state EJ programs.
Analyze vehicle access, commute mode, journey-to-work times, and transit dependency. Essential for TDP updates, Title VI analyses, and transit-oriented development studies.
Map cost burden (households spending 30%+ of income on housing), overcrowding, and renter vs. owner ratios. Track displacement pressure in gentrifying neighborhoods.
Project school-age population (5–17), senior population (65+), and household formation rates to plan capital facilities. Compare tract-level age structures to identify service gaps.
Quantify community need for HUD CDBG, HOME, LIHTC, and federal infrastructure funding. Low-to-moderate income area (LMI) determinations use ACS tract-level income data directly.
Honest answer: CensusGo today is a tabular data platform — we deliver the numbers at every geography. The spatial layer is the next frontier. Here's what exists now, and where we're headed.
TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) is the Census Bureau's national geographic database. It contains boundary shapefiles for every census geography — states, counties, tracts, block groups, and individual blocks — plus roads, water features, and address ranges. It is the authoritative source for all census spatial data and is used by every major GIS platform.
TIGER data is free, public, and released annually. The challenge for platforms like CensusGo is that hosting and serving shapefiles at scale — especially at the tract, block group, and block level — requires significant GIS infrastructure (PostGIS, tile servers, or a GIS API layer).
These external resources give you full TIGER/Line access today while we build our spatial layer:
All ACS 5-year variables available as structured tables via the Census API. The Neighborhood Lookup tool on this page delivers sortable tract-level data for any county in the country with one click.
The VAP and CVAP map tools already use the Census Bureau's TIGERweb tile service to render state-level choropleth maps. No shapefile hosting required — TIGERweb serves geographic boundaries directly as map tiles.
We are currently migrating decennial block-level demographic data into the CensusGo database. When complete, this will enable tract and block group rollup tables, within-tract variation analysis, and a foundation for spatial joins with TIGER boundaries.
We will integrate the Census Bureau's cartographic boundary GeoJSON API to render tract-level maps for any selected county — no PostGIS required. This will make the Neighborhood Lookup table above visual and exportable as a map image.
Full spatial query capability: draw a polygon and get all census tracts within it, download joined demographic + boundary shapefiles, and spatial joins between TIGER and ACS data. This requires a PostGIS layer and is on the longer-term roadmap.
tigerweb.geo.census.gov/arcgis/rest/services/TIGERweb
can be loaded directly into ArcGIS, QGIS, or Leaflet.js as a WMS/MapServer layer. Pair those boundaries with the tabular ACS data you download from CensusGo for a complete spatial workflow today.
Pull tract-level demographics, housing profiles, and population pyramids for any geography in the country — right now, no GIS required.