Data Access

U.S. Federal Data from IPUMS during the Shutdown

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By Sarah Flood & Kari Williams

If you eagerly await new data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) or the American Community Survey (ACS) this time of year, you might be wondering how the current U.S. federal government shutdown affects release timelines for these data. We’re wondering, too! While we don’t know when these data will be released, we can share what we know and what you can expect from IPUMS.

Delays to the release of new federal data

What we know: Any delays to the processing and release of new federal data also delays our work and the release of these data via IPUMS. We expect delays for at least some federal data releases (see this dataindex.us post for a helpful overview of federal data collection and release during a government shutdown). For example, we typically expect that the September Basic Monthly data from the CPS would be available for download from the Census Bureau website as of yesterday, October 8. However, the Census Bureau’s shutdown plans specify that monthly economic indicators will not be available during the shutdown; therefore IPUMS CPS cannot process the data until they are released.

What you can expect from us: For the foreseeable future, you can expect to see a banner on the IPUMS data collection homepages for US data sources communicating what we know about data release timelines. We will note when we are still awaiting the release of data from the original U.S. federal agency data providers, once the original data have been released and are being processed by IPUMS, and when the new data have been integrated into IPUMS.

IPUMS data will continue to be available

What we know: All of the data available to the research community via IPUMS prior to the shutdown will remain available. We do not foresee any disruptions to current data access. Note that we are processing the ACS 1-Year Summary File data released on September 11, 2025 for inclusion in IPUMS NHGIS; we typically release this data file via NHGIS in November.

What you can expect from us: While awaiting the release of new data, we will move other work forward. We’re shifting our attention to some longer-term projects and making other improvements to the data and documentation based on what we’ve heard from IPUMS users.

Once the shutdown is over, we will return to releasing CPS and ACS data quickly following their public release. We will clearly communicate the status of our work with the IPUMS user community via the banners on our IPUMS data collection homepages. We also welcome your questions – email us at ipums@umn.edu.

Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) Data Again Available to New Users

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By Miriam King

After funding for USAID and the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) was eliminated in February 2025, new researchers could no longer apply online for access to DHS data, and existing DHS users could not gain access to additional countries’ data. This restriction affected would-be users of both the original DHS public use files and the integrated version of DHS data through IPUMS DHS. Fortunately, The DHS Program just announced, “We are now open for new registrations.”

The DHS Program logoAccording to The DHS Program website, a three-year grant from the Gates Foundation is supporting the dhsprogram.com website and data archive, where researchers apply for access and can download the original public use files. Once a researcher is approved for DHS data access, they can log in to the IPUMS DHS website, create a customized dataset with the samples and harmonized variables they need, and download that file for analysis on their computer. Anyone can use the IPUMS DHS website to learn about the data, including documentation about the consistently coded variables and the availability of variables by sample, to plan a research project; they need to log in only if they would like to create and download a customized data file.

The grant funding will also support other useful elements of The DHS Program website: StatCompiler (for summary statistics by sample), the DHS Program API, and the Spatial Data Repository (for maps and shapefiles).

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IPUMS CPS Checks on Basic Monthly Data

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By Sarah Flood, Renae Rodgers, and Kari Williams

Federal data are critical for understanding much about the US population from its size and composition to its health and employment. The Current Population Survey (CPS) is our nation’s official source of information about the labor force. At the beginning of each month, we eagerly await the first Friday when the Employment Situation Summary (aka the monthly jobs report) will be released (it isn’t just us, right??). The monthly snapshot of the US labor force serves as a bellwether for how our economy is faring.

The Wednesday after the jobs report is released, we at IPUMS clear the decks in preparation for the release of the CPS Basic Monthly Survey (BMS) by the Census Bureau. The CPS BMS is the individual-level data from which the jobs report is generated. Our goal is always to process these data as soon as they’re released by the Census Bureau so that we can deliver them to IPUMS CPS users as quickly as possible. Those who rely on CPS BMS data each month might be familiar with coping strategies while waiting for the data–obsessive page refreshing, some nervous pacing, maybe wondering why they haven’t yet been released (iykyk).

While quickly processing CPS Basic Monthly data is a priority, so, too, is ensuring data quality. Each month, we carefully inspect CPS BMS data at several points in our process. First, we review all of the variables for codes that are undocumented or have suspicious frequencies. Second, we rely on a suite of tools during our integration process that alert us to any codes in the data that we haven’t accounted for in our variable-level harmonizations. After harmonization, we compare univariate statistics from the newest month data to the previous month of data. Generally we expect very little change across months and we have built tools that are designed to flag variable-level differences above a certain threshold as well as new codes on either end of the distribution.

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Making Your Customized IPUMS MICS Data File

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By Anna Bolgrien

The newest IPUMS data collection, IPUMS MICS, has many similarities with other IPUMS microdata collections. However, there is one major difference: the IPUMS MICS Data Extract System only uses Stata.

Yes, you read that right. Users of IPUMS MICS must use Stata to open and create their customized data file.

Let’s start with how using IPUMS MICS is the same as using other IPUMS microdata collections.

If you are an IPUMS user, you will find the process of browsing the variables, looking at documentation, and adding samples to your data cart completely familiar. If you are not familiar with IPUMS, you can read more about browsing and selecting variables.

However, when you finish choosing variables and samples in IPUMS MICS and click “Create Extract,” things start to look different.

Normally, you could change the data format, but the only option currently available for IPUMS MICS is a .dat (fixed-width text) file format.

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Online Analysis Tool Now Exports CSV Output

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By Matthew Sobek

IPUMS is pleased to announce a major usability upgrade to our online analysis tool: the ability to download tabular output as a CSV file. No more cleaning up html!

The IPUMS online analysis tool has been a big hit with our users, and we’ve made it available for most of the IPUMS data collections. If you haven’t tried it, you should. We even have a tutorial.

Despite its popularity with users, the SDA (Survey Documentation and Analysis) software that drives the system has always had a significant limitation: it produces tables in html format, which is fine for web display but highly inconvenient for cutting and pasting into documents.

In spring 2020 the SDA folks at the Institute for Scientific Analysis were looking for a new project and thoughtfully asked what change we thought users would most appreciate. We responded immediately “CSV downloads,” and within a few months, they had produced a working version of the software that incorporates the new feature. We have now upgraded all the IPUMS sites that offer online analysis to the new version of SDA.

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Delivering data: Technology at the MPC

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MPCSuperman (1)

“Good IT is invisible,” says MPC IT Core director Fran Fabrizio. “You want the users to have the idea that it’s a magic black box.” Though the intent is for the technology behind IPUMS and the other MPC data tools to seem effortless, Fabrizio understands the extent of the human work goes that goes into producing good technology. Getting 2.6 terabytes of data out to users each week requires no small amount of technology behind it.

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