US Census Bureau APIs

To improve access to data and encourage innovation, the US Census Bureau has begun to provide API access to its data, beginning with the 2010 Census Summary.

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US Census Bureau collects data about the US people and economy, including

• Population & Housing Census - every 10 years
• Economic Census - every 5 years
• Census of Governments - every 5 years
• American Community Survey - annually
• Economic Indicators

To improve access to data and encourage innovation, the Census Bureau has begun to provide API access to some data sets, beginning with the 2010 Census Summary File 1 and the 2010 American Community Survey (five year data).

USCB invites developers to use these beta APIs, join the Developer Forum, and provide feedback to help us move forward with continued API development.

Accessing Data

Data is accessible to software developers through a stateless HTTP GET request, and you will need to add a key to URL in order for query results to be returned.

Here is an example of the request URL for 2010 Census SF1 data that has an assigned key inserted:

http://thedataweb.rm.census.gov/data/2010/sf1?key=ValidKeyHere&get=P0010001,NAME&for=state:*

Query Response

The response for all queries is formatted as a two dimensional JSON array where the first row provides column names and subsequent rows provide data values.

An example query response looks like this:
[["P0010001","NAME","state"],
["710231","Alaska","02"],
["4779736","Alabama","01"],
["2915918","Arkansas","05"],
["6392017","Arizona","04"],
["37253956","California","06"],

For more information, and to get API key visit

www.census.gov/developers/