March 18 revision to the 2019-2023 5-year: the correction differs by survey year

USA
1

The March 18, 2026 revision note for the 2019-2023 5-year ACS/PRCS describes the pre-revision files as indexed to 2022 dollars, but a record-level comparison of the two vintages says the correction was not uniform across survey years. The note reads:

Previously, the monetary values for all years in these 2023 5-year samples (2019-2023) were indexed to the 2022 dollar value. These samples are now correctly indexed to the 2023 dollar value.

I still have the pre-revision copy of that file, so I matched it against a current extract person by person (on SAMPLE, SERIAL, PERNUM) and took the ratio of corrected INCWAGE to the old value. If the old file had been uniformly indexed to 2022 dollars, that ratio should be one constant, the 2022-to-2023 step of about 1.041, in every survey year. It is different in each survey year:

MULTYEAR corrected / pre-revision (median) matched records
2019 1.01331 1,598,759
2020 1.04832 1,287,403
2021 1.08091 1,551,182
2022 1.04125 1,639,193
2023 1.00000, no record changed 1,666,763

That is 7.74 million records with positive wage income in both versions, and more than 99% of each year’s records sit within 0.001 of that year’s median.

Two things there do not fit the note. The 2023 records did not move at all, where a uniform 2022 indexing would have needed the same 1.041 as every other year. And each year’s ratio is instead very close to that year’s own single-year inflation step, so 2019 got roughly the 2019-to-2020 step, 2020 the 2020-to-2021 step, and so on, which also lines up with the year-over-year steps implied by your CPI99 table. What that looks like to me is that each survey year received the following year’s adjustment factor, so every pre-2023 year came up one year short. On that reading, the 2022 records are the only ones the note describes exactly, since they would have received the 2023 factor of 1.0 and stayed at nominal 2022 dollars.

Just thought I would raise this for awareness and in case it would help others.

Thanks!
CJ

2

Thank you for helping clarify this revision note. You are correct that the previous issue with inflation adjustment in the 2019-2023 5-year ACS was that each survey year had received the following year’s adjustment factor for converting to 2023 dollars.

For example, monetary values from the 2021 data were previously being adjusted by a factor 1.04125 for the purpose of converting these to 2023 dollars. However, 1.04125 is not the correct factor for converting 2021 values to either 2022 or 2023 dollars; it is instead the correct factor for converting 2022 values to 2023 dollars. Similarly, the adjustment factor for converting 2021 values to 2023 dollars was being incorrectly applied to 2020 values, and so on. Additionally, no adjustment factor was being applied to 2023 data (which is why it appears unchanged in your table).

I will connect with my colleagues to see if we can edit the revision history note to more clearly explain this. Thank you for sharing your findings so that other users can be aware of how the data was revised to fix this error.