# Family incomes ACS B19113
**URL:** https://forum.ipums.org/t/family-incomes-acs-b19113/3628
**Category:** General
**Created:** [July 6, 2020, 8:10pm UTC](https://forum.ipums.org/t/family-incomes-acs-b19113/3628 "2020-07-06T20:10:02Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Chip\_Halbach](https://forum.ipums.org/u/Chip_Halbach)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2020, 8:10pm UTC](https://forum.ipums.org/t/family-incomes-acs-b19113/3628/1 "2020-07-06T20:10:03Z")
IPUMS – I’m trying to get as close as I can through IPUMS to the median family incomes HUD uses for income limits for a given metro area (show below as # xxxxx). They state that they use ACS table B19113.
To get close I’ve used the following variables but I’m hoping you can guide me/correct me on this.
Dependent variable: ftotinc (\* - _)
Weight: hhwt
filter1: met2013(XXXXX)
filter2: famsize (2-_)
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### Author:  [@KariWilliams](https://forum.ipums.org/u/KariWilliams)
#### Post date: [July 10, 2020, 2:36am UTC](https://forum.ipums.org/t/family-incomes-acs-b19113/3628/2 "2020-07-10T02:36:57Z")
It looks like you are using the SDA online analysis tool; please let me know if that is not the case.
Unfortunately, it may not be realistic to replicate this table using SDA. Family income as measured by [FTOTINC](https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/variables/ftotinc#description_section) is an IPUMS-created variable that sums individual income for family members based on families defined as [FAMUNIT](https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/variables/FAMUNIT#description_section). IPUMS USA only offers the Census Bureau measure of family income as an unharmonized or source variable ([US2018C\_FINCP](https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/variables/US2018C_0073) for the 2014-2018 5-year ACS data); source variables are not available for SDA , but you may include them as part of a [data extract](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZR0aDwr91s) for analysis in a statistical package. I encourage you to review the documentation in FTOTINC and this information on [families](https://censusreporter.org/topics/families/) and [income](https://censusreporter.org/topics/income/) in ACS data for some context about the different definitions of families.
If you want to use FTOTINC and SDA to create a table of the median family income as measured by FTOTINC, remember to exclude any missing/out of universe values for FTOTINC. If you weight with HHWT, you should restrict your analytical sample to a single person per household (I recommend doing this by specifying `pernum(1-1)` in the selection filters field). Note that if a household contains more than one family, this approach will not capture the second family’s unique value for FTOTINC. You may be interested in including the IPUMS USA variable [HHTYPE](https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/variables/hhtype#codes_section) in your selection filters to try and mimic the family households that Census uses in its version of the table; I suspect that this is what you are getting at with your selection filter using [FAMSIZE](https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/variables/famsize#description_section). It seems like you are using the “Means” tab and selecting median as the percentile to display under the “Median/Percentile Options” drop down menu; I don’t know of another way to use SDA to calculate the median for continuous variables with as many values as FTOTINC.
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### Author:  [@JonathanSchroeder](https://forum.ipums.org/u/JonathanSchroeder)
#### Post date: [July 10, 2020, 1:36pm UTC](https://forum.ipums.org/t/family-incomes-acs-b19113/3628/3 "2020-07-10T13:36:06Z")
Note also that the MET2013 variable doesn’t correspond exactly to the metro areas identified in ACS summary tables, for two reasons:
1. MET2013 corresponds to the [2013 delineations of metro areas](https://www.census.gov/geographies/reference-files/time-series/demo/metro-micro/delineation-files.html). The ACS summary tables use those delineations only in the 2013, 2014 and 2015 ACS releases. For later years, the [ACS tables use later metro area delineations](https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/geography-acs/geography-boundaries-by-year.html), which deviate somewhat from the 2013 delineations.
2. More significantly, most metro areas can’t be exactly identified in public-use microdata. MET2013 identifies metro areas _as closely as possible_ but there may be as much as 15% mismatch between a MET2013 code and the corresponding 2013 metro area’s population, and there are numerous metro areas that MET2013 doesn’t identify because a mismatch below 15% isn’t possible. See the [MET2013 description](https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/variables/met2013#description_section) for more info.
If by chance you’d be able to use ACS summary data for your work, note also that IPUMS provides ACS summary tables (including B19113) through [IPUMS NHGIS](https://nhgis.org). These tables identify all metro areas exactly as they’re identified in the ACS source data.