American Community Survey
Two distributions from the 2022 survey: annual income by sector of employment, and monthly rent by region of the United States.
A testbed for showing the Census Bureau's American Community Survey as something you can interrogate rather than something you read a summary of. There are thousands of variables and millions of people's and households' datapoints in it; these two are a start.
People earn very different amounts depending on the sector they work in
Annual income reported in the 2022 survey, binned on a log scale and stacked by sector of employment. Sectors are ordered by mean income.
Households in different regions pay very different rent
Monthly rent reported by households in the 2022 survey, by region of the United States.
The rest of this set
- Two decades of American incomes — 38 million people · 2000–2022
- New York incomes by area and sector — 15 million people · 2005–2022
- New York incomes by area and race — 15 million people · 2005–2022
This page reënvisions the display of public data for the public good, and is part of an experiment in exploring urban non-private spaces with my partner. The Census Bureau notes that government agencies use these statistics to allocate over $675 billion each year back to communities, and that businesses use the estimates for strategic decisions; insurance companies, health systems and real estate developers use them too. If you have ideas for other variables worth looking at, or better ways to show these millions of datapoints, say so.
Data and code
- Data: American Community Survey, U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 public use microdata sample.
- Transforms: income-histogram-with-sector.sql and household-histogram-with-region.sql.
- Pipeline: jaanli/american-community-survey — fork it to build your own from the thousands of available variables.