If you were looking forward to the September release of the 1-Year 2020 American Community Survey (ACS) data for geographies larger than 65,000 people, a July 29th Census Bureau announcement will come as a disappointment.
The ACS is distributed to more than 3.5 million addresses annually and disruptions to the survey process and follow-up at non-responding households resulted in a 33% drop in completed surveys collected in 2020. The announcement noted that bias among the non-respondents introduced substantial data quality errors that would have rendered the resulting statistics unreliable. The 2020 ACS Public Use Microdata Samples also are impacted.
In their place, an experimental 1-year product will be released with limited tables and for limited geographies.
Even with those cancellations, the December release of 2016-2020 5-Year ACS for all geographies remains on schedule.