-666666666 for census tract real median family income 2019-2023 ACS estimates

1

Hi all,

I’m working with 2019-2023 five-year ACS data for census tracts in LA City. I noticed that several census tracts have a reported real median family income of -666666666. I’m assuming this means missing or censored, but I could confirm this in the accompanying documentation.

Curious if anyone has an answer to this.

Thanks!

Kelsey

2

The Census Bureau documents the meaning of special values in ACS summary data in its Notes on ACS Estimate and Annotation Values. According to that page, -666666666 indicates:

The estimate could not be computed because there were an insufficient number of sample observations. For a ratio of medians estimate, one or both of the median estimates falls in the lowest interval or highest interval of an open-ended distribution. … For a 5-year median estimate, the margin of error associated with a median was larger than the median itself.

Thanks for bringing to our attention that you found this value in (I assume) IPUMS NHGIS data. In the past, we’ve removed the negative values and replaced them with blanks for NHGIS extracts, and we still have some documentation indicating that that’s our continued practice, but we apparently stopped doing that at some point in recent years. I’ll try to make sure our documentation is more consistent with our practice!

3

Thank you, Jonathan!

4

and, yes. I found the value in NHGIS data