Press Release Number: CB25-TPS.27

APRIL 24, 2025 — The U.S. Census Bureau today released new data products from the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS), a survey that measures business conditions and projections on an ongoing basis. The BTOS includes data for multiunit/multilocation businesses. BTOS will continue to collect data complementary to key items found on other economic surveys, such as revenues, employees, hours, and inventories.

Work from home (WFH) supplemental questions were added to the BTOS for one cycle (11/4/2024-1/26/2025). Existing measures of WFH reveal significant data gaps in understanding its scope, particularly from the business perspective. To address this, eleven WFH questions were developed for the BTOS, covering the share and frequency of WFH, challenges, management policies, and business impact. These data are now available.

BTOS data are representative of all employer businesses in the U.S. economy, excluding farms. BTOS provides insight into the state of the economy by providing continuous, timely data for key economic measures every two weeks. By providing continuous data with geographic and subsector detail, BTOS captures the impact of events like natural disasters and economic crises and assists in monitoring recovery efforts.

The BTOS sample consists of approximately 1.2 million businesses with biweekly data collection. Selected businesses are split into six panels (approximately 200,000 cases per panel) that will be asked to report every 12 weeks for a year. The Census Bureau estimates it takes the average respondent approximately nine minutes to complete the survey, including the time for reviewing the instructions and answers.

Data will be released biweekly and available by sector, state and the 25 most populous metropolitan statistical areas. Survey results give local, state and federal officials essential, real-time data to aid in policymaking and decision-making. In addition, the information aids businesses in making economic decisions.

No news release associated with this announcement. Tip sheet only.

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Press Release Number: CB24-TPS.102

OCT. 10, 2024 — The U.S. Census Bureau today released new data products from the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS), a survey that measures business conditions and projections on an ongoing basis. The BTOS includes data for multiunit/multilocation businesses. BTOS will continue to collect data complementary to key items found on other Economic surveys, such as revenues, employees, hours, and inventories. Additional details on artificial intelligence use and types used were added for one cycle and released March 28, 2024.

BTOS data are representative of all employer businesses in the U.S. economy, excluding farms. BTOS provides insight into the state of the economy by providing continuous, timely data for key economic measures every two weeks. By providing continuous data with geographic and subsector detail, BTOS captures the impact of events like natural disasters and economic crises, and assists in monitoring recovery efforts.

The BTOS sample consists of approximately 1.2 million businesses with biweekly data collection. Selected businesses are split into six panels (approximately 200,000 cases per panel) that will be asked to report every 12 weeks for a year. The Census Bureau estimates it takes the average respondent approximately nine minutes to complete the survey, including the time for reviewing the instructions and answers.  

Data will be released biweekly and available by sector, state and the 25 most populous metropolitan statistical areas. Survey results give local, state and federal officials essential, real-time data to aid in policymaking and decision-making. In addition, the information aids businesses in making economic decisions.

No news release associated with this announcement. Tip sheet only.

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Press Release Number: CB24-TPS.101

OCT. 8, 2024 — The U.S. Census Bureau today released an early look at data from the 2023 Annual Survey of School System Finances. The data provide initial insight into spending per public school pupil (pre-K through 12th grade), as well as revenue and other school system spending in 41 states. Due to the early release, only a subset of geographic areas is included.

The tables in the preliminary release present fiscal year (FY) 2023 school system finance data. The accompanying visualization compares these statistics to data in prior years to provide timely information about how they may have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

These data are preliminary and are subject to change by the final release. The fiscal year is not uniform across all school systems and may vary. Survey data are not adjusted to conform school systems to a uniform fiscal year. The Census Bureau plans to release the final FY 2023 Annual Survey of School System Finances data tables and files with finance data for all 50 states and the District of Columbia in May 2025.

No news release associated with this product. Tip sheet only.

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Press Release Number: CB24-TPS.98

SEPT. 30, 2024 – The U.S. Census Bureau today announced the release of new geospatial data, including the first-time release of Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER)/Line files in GeoPackage format. GeoPackage files are spatial extracts that are based on the Open Geospatial Consortium Encoding Standard and can be used with geographic software.

This release of the Census Bureau’s geospatial data includes the new 119th Congressional District and 2024 State Legislative District boundaries provided in the Master Address File (MAF)/TIGER System. These files contain geographic information, which are spatial data encoded in a file format, including TIGER/Line Shapefiles, TIGER/Line Geodatabases and TIGER/Line GeoPackages, which contain national coverage (for geographic boundaries or features) or state coverage (for boundaries within state). 

Geospatial data contain, but are not limited to, legal, administrative, and statistical boundaries, roads and hydrography. These data can be linked to the Census Bureau’s current address count listing files and will also link to future 2024 vintage demographic data on data.census.gov, enabling users to visualize census tabular data as a map. 

TIGER/Line Shapefiles do not include demographic data but they do contain geographic entity codes (GEOIDs) that can be linked to the Census Bureau’s demographic data. For help determining which product to use, visit the TIGER Data Products Guide page.

No news release associated with this product. Tip sheet only.

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The Census Bureau produces custom tables to provide Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) data to provide HR, legal and government professionals, and organizations with the data they need to observe and compare general population demographic and earnings statistics to their workforce populations.

Organizations and professionals can use these data to analyze hiring and pay equity for protected class populations (such as race, sex, and age categories) by geography for over 200 specific occupation categories.

Discover these EEO tables and how to use the American Community Survey EEO table tool. 

Small Business Week 2024: How Small Businesses Impact Our Economy

Written by Adam Grundy

Every year since 1963, U.S. presidents have issued a Small Business Week proclamation to recognize the contributions of entrepreneurs and small business owners.

The theme of Small Business Week 2024, which runs from April 28 – May 4, is “Building on the Small Business Boom.”

A small business is one with fewer than 500 employees, according to the Small Business Administration. The Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics indicate there were 5,358,600 such firms in 2021, up from 5,322,155 in 2020.

According to County Business Patterns, 56.6% of all U.S. employer establishments in 2021 (the latest year for which these statistics are available) had fewer than five employees, up from 55% in 2020.

Continue reading to learn more about:

• Nonemployer businesses
• Women-owned businesses

As part of our ongoing commitment to innovation and to address our many stakeholder needs, the Economic Directorate has been working across all areas of the U.S. Census Bureau to reengineer our annual economic surveys. This process began in 2015, when the Census Bureau asked the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine to assemble a panel to conduct a comprehensive review of our annual economic surveys. Their findings and recommendations are summarized in this 2018 report “Reengineering the Census Bureau’s Annual Economic Surveys,” resulting in the Annual Integrated Economic Survey (AIES) that began data collection March 15.

Seven legacy annual economic surveys listed below have all had their final releases in their current format and are now integrated into a single survey – the AIES.

• Annual Capital Expenditures Survey (ACES).
• Annual Retail Trade Survey (ARTS).
• Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM).
• Annual Wholesale Trade Survey (AWTS).
• Manufacturers’ Unfilled Orders Survey (M3UFO).
• Report of Organization (COS).
• Service Annual Survey (SAS).

For me, this integration represents how we are adapting to our ever-changing economy where economic activity does not always fall into one category. While we will continue to produce data by industry and sector, the vision of AIES is the integration of the data as well as the processes.  By being open to doing surveys differently and more efficiently and not being limited by past practices, we are able to transform our business statistics, easily allowing for more robust data products that are cross-cutting rather than program-specific.

The U.S. Census Bureau today released a brief highlighting the latest available statistics on commuting behavior in the United States and Puerto Rico from the 2022 American Community Survey (ACS). The brief, Commuting in the United States: 2022, explores recent commuting trends using estimates from the 2022 ACS, 1-year dataset, with comparisons to 2019 and 2021.

The analysis shows changes in the way people travel to work since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic along with several key commuting characteristics, including means of transportation to work, travel time to work, and time of departure from home to go to work.

▶️ Almost 140 million people in the United States routinely commuted to work in 2022, and more than 20 million worked from home.

▶️ Among U.S. workers, 15.2% worked from home in 2022, down from almost 17.9% in 2021 but still far higher than the 5.7% that worked from home before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019. Among workers in Puerto Rico, 5.9% worked from home in 2022, down from 7.4% in 2021 but more than twice the 2019 share of 2.4%.

Continue reading to explore more data highlights. 

February 13, 2024

Written by: Adam Grundy

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/02/legal-sports-betting.html