Data Access – Use It for Good

A Missing Piece: The 2025 U.S. Government Shutdown and the Current Population Survey

December 22, 2025December 22, 2025 by mpcblog

By Renae Rodgers

Current Population Survey (CPS) data collection and processing were among the many U.S. government programs and services interrupted by the October 1-November 12, 2025 U.S. government shutdown. This blog post gives an overview of the impacts of the 2025 government shutdown on CPS data collection and processing, explores how missed data collection in October and delayed data collection in November due to the shutdown impacted CPS response rates, and discusses implications for the CPS panel component.

Data Collection and Processing

The Current Population Survey is one of two surveys used to create the Employment Situation News Release published every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS); the CPS is commonly referred to as the “household survey” in these releases. Each month they are in the CPS, household respondents are asked questions on work and job search activities for members of their households during the week that includes the 12th of the month – this is known as the “reference week” (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025a). CPS households are interviewed during the week immediately following the reference week – the week that contains the 19th. Data collection lasts for approximately 10 days. During November and December, reference weeks and subsequent data collection may be moved one week earlier if necessary to avoid coinciding with holiday periods. The Employment Situation news releases are typically published the first Friday of the month following data collection (e.g., the August Employment Situation news release is the first Friday of September) and the Public Use Microdata files are typically published the Wednesday following the Employment Situation news release.

The 2025 government shutdown impacted data release, collection, and processing in unique ways. Figure 1 shows the CPS reference weeks for September through December of 2025, the CPS interview weeks for this same period, and the days on which the federal government was shut down.

Historical Supplemental Poverty Measure

December 19, 2025December 18, 2025 by mpcblog

By Stephanie Richards, Kari Williams, and Sarah Flood

The Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) of the Current Population Survey is the official source of information about poverty in the United States. Since 1968, the ASEC has been used to create the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) and has included the variables needed to create that measure. The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) and the variables needed to create it were first released by the Census Bureau in 2010, reporting the SPM for 2009¹. In contrast to the OPM, the SPM provides a more complete picture of the economic wellbeing of American households.

The value of the SPM is apparent – it is a comprehensive and nuanced measure that accounts for the diversity of living arrangements, variability in cost of living, and a wider array of available financial resources and demands. However, the temporal coverage of SPM is limited; the Census Bureau only has data back to 2010. Over the last ten years, researchers at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy (CPSP) have eliminated this constraint by compiling the data necessary to create SPM and make it available back to 1968, and have shared the data with the research community via the CPSP Historical SPM Data Portal.

CPSP researchers have also partnered with IPUMS to disseminate their historical SPM data via IPUMS CPS. This includes the poverty status variables (i.e., SPMPOV and SPMPOVANC12) as well as the inputs and thresholds for creating them. If you know IPUMS, you know that we loooooove the chance to extend a valuable measure back in time. We are incredibly grateful to CPSP for the important work they have done and are thrilled to make it even easier for IPUMS CPS users to access the historical SPM data.

In this blog post, we briefly describe differences between the components – family, resources, and needs – used to create OPM and (historical) SPM, preview CPSP’s “anchored” poverty variables that facilitate comparisons over time that reference a set cost-of-living standard, and share suggestions for further reading (because we know you are going to want to learn even more about this!).

U.S. Federal Data from IPUMS during the Shutdown

October 13, 2025October 9, 2025 by mpcblog

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

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

September 3, 2025 by mpcblog

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 logo According 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).

IPUMS CPS Checks on Basic Monthly Data

April 9, 2025 by mpcblog

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.

Learning and Teaching Resources from IPUMS

August 20, 2024August 20, 2024 by mpcblog

By Kari Williams

In Minneapolis, MN at IPUMS HQ, the days are getting shorter, the nights are getting cooler, and school supplies are on sale in retail stores. Whether you approach “Back to School” season with enthusiasm, dread, or a mixture of the two, we want to remind you that IPUMS has great resources for students, faculty, and researchers!

Making Your Customized IPUMS MICS Data File

January 25, 2024January 24, 2024 by mpcblog

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.