Are income figures in multiyear ACS I-PUMS already inflation-adjusted to most recent year in series?

1

I believe the answer is no, but want to confirm. My reason for asking is the following.

We need to create a new variable that will give us more detailed ratios of total family income to poverty above 500% of poverty. (The available POVERTY variable provides detailed ratios below 500%, but just lumps all values above 500% of poverty.) To compare total family income to the appropriate year’s poverty thresholds, we need to know the total income the family reported on the ACS only with adjustments to the year they completed the ACS.

This is one of three questions I’m asking today. All three are related to the same analysis.

Thank you in advance for your help!

2

For multi-year ACS files all dollar amounts are inflated to the dollar of the last year in the file (you can read more about multi-year files here). So, to get incomes relative to the year respondents reported their income (which is stored in the variable MULTYEAR for multi-year samples) you will have to translate the dollar amounts. IPUMS-USA has a small table of Consumer Price Index adjustment factor relative to 1999 in the INCTOT description, which you can use to translate income figures to their appropriate year.

I hope this helps.