[cepth]

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.

[amyjess]

> 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.

https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/guidance/estimat...

Also, ACS-3 has been discontinued.

[cepth]

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