What is this site?
It brings county-level demographic, health, and economic data together from public federal sources — Census ACS, CDC, HUD, CMS and more — so every measure is comparable across the same counties, states, and the US.
Where does the data come from?
All of it is public government data. Each source, its vintage, and its release schedule are listed on the Sources & Dashboards page, and every measure in the dataset records its exact source.
Where does Life Expectancy come from?
This one is the exception, and the difference matters. Life expectancy (and premature death) is calculated here by the author from CDC WONDER mortality files — a 5-year pooled figure matched to the ACS 5-year window. It is not an official CDC-published county life-expectancy statistic, and you will not find these exact numbers on CDC's site.
So: CDC WONDER is the underlying mortality data and should be credited as such, but the life-expectancy calculation itself is original work on this site. Very few sources publish current county-level life expectancy at all, which is why it is computed here.
Where do the county homeless numbers come from?
Also derived, not published — and worth understanding. HUD counts homelessness through its annual Point-in-Time (PIT) count, but reports it by Continuum of Care (CoC), not by county. CoC boundaries do not line up with counties: some cover a city and a county together, many "Balance of State" CoCs span dozens of rural counties, and in New England they are built from towns. HUD publishes the official CoC boundaries, but no official county crosswalk.
The county figures here therefore rely on a CoC-to-county crosswalk built by the author, assembled from HUD CoC geography, state CoC service-area maps and documents, planning-region maps, an older published crosswalk as a fallback, and manual corrections. Confidence varies by county: some are named explicitly in a source, while others are assigned as a Balance-of-State residual, and a few counties are split across more than one CoC. Treat these as careful approximations, not official HUD county statistics. Every CoC, listed by state, is on the HUD CoCs page.
What areas does it cover?
All U.S. counties, with state and national figures for comparison. Some measures go down to the census tract level; a few are only available at the state or national level.
Does this include Americans living overseas?
No. Like the Census, this site counts the resident population — people living in the United States. U.S. citizens living abroad — roughly 1% of the population, an estimated several million people — are not in the ACS or decennial counts. Because there is no official list of them, the best estimate comes from the Federal Voting Assistance Program's Overseas Citizen Population Analysis.
What is ACS-5?
The Census Bureau's American Community Survey 5-year estimates — five years of survey responses pooled together so that even small areas have reliable numbers. It is the backbone of this site. The latest release covers 2020–2024.
How current is the data, and how often is it updated?
It varies by source. ACS-5 updates once a year (usually each December); CDC, HUD, CMS and others follow their own schedules. Each source's typical release month and lag are shown on the Sources & Dashboards page.
Why is there no history beyond the prior year?
Because timeliness is the priority. This site is built for a range of users, but especially for people working directly with the data — local public health, homelessness services, and the like — and what they need is current numbers.
Government data is already about a year old by the time it is published. Many organizations and dashboards then take another six months, sometimes a year, to load it. The goal here is to have it in within about ten days of release.
Maintaining a deep history is a different job, and a hard one to get right. Definitions, geographies, and methods change over time — a measure gets reworded, a survey is redesigned, a county boundary moves — and unless those breaks are properly accounted for, a long trend line can quietly mislead. Rather than publish a series that has not been carefully aligned, this site shows the current year and the prior year — enough to see the direction of travel.
If you need history, use the ACS Custom Reports page: it pulls earlier years, census tracts, and every ACS field. ACS measures are more than half of what is on this site.
Two exceptions are being built out: Life Expectancy and Homelessness. History is being extended for those precisely because current county-level figures do not exist in any other dashboard or dataset.
Can I download the data?
Yes, and it's free. The reports, charts, maps, and analyses throughout the site have a download button that exports the data you are looking at — and, where it makes sense, the full measure list behind it.
Everything here is built from public, open government data, so you are welcome to download and use it for non-commercial purposes. Please credit the original source (listed on the Sources & Dashboards page), and check that source for official figures.
Is this an official government website?
No. This is an independent, non-commercial site that uses public data only. Always check the original source for official figures.