The main census is only every ten years, but there are other datasets updates more often, as well as extrapolated data. The issue for me wasn’t data being out of date, it’s just that the structure and content is fairly arcane if you’re not well versed in census - I assume much of the structure has been carried forward over the decades as there’s an obvious need to make sure data is comparable across different census.
The main datasets that are tied to a "geography" are the American Community Survey (ACS) and the Census.
The ACS comes in 1, 3, and 5 year editions. The 1-year is the least precise, and has the smallest sample, while the 5-year uses trailing 5-year data. The tradeoff is that ACS-5 estimates are only available, IIRC, for geographies of 50,000 or more people.
The ACS-1 estimates for 2016 are already released. ACS-5 will come out in December.
> The ACS comes in 1, 3, and 5 year editions. The 1-year is the least precise, and has the smallest sample, while the 5-year uses trailing 5-year data. The tradeoff is that ACS-5 estimates are only available, IIRC, for geographies of 50,000 or more people.
Other way around. ACS-1 is only available for geographies above 20k people, but ACS-5 is available for everything up to and including the block group level.
My apologies, I was wrong about the direction of the tradeoff. I.e., ACS-1 is only available for larger geographies.
There is a distinction though between the "ACS-1" and "ACS-1 supplemental estimates". The former is only available for 65,000+ person geographies.
Also, it's worth noting that for ACS-1 datasets, if you're looking at the census tract or census block level, you're going to have a significant number of omitted estimates. E.g. if you want to see the year to year median income even in a well-surveyed area like New York City, there will be many NA values