Census Shape Files

The U.S. Census provides geographic shape files for different grains of census areas. We use three primary areas: County, Tract and Block Group. You can find the original file downloads from the U.S. Census here.

For census tract and block groups, the U.S. Census provides shapefiles on a state by state basis. We have preprocessed these state files to create single shape files for the entire U.S. You can find the County, Tract and Block Group shapefiles in our S3 reference bucket here:

• County
• Tract
• Block Group

The full documentation of data fields can be found here. Here is a brief description of the fields taken from the above full documentation:

Block Groups:

Field	Length	Type	Description
STATEFP	2	String	Current state FIPS code
COUNTYFP	3	String	Current county FIPS code
TRACTCE	6	String	Current census tract code
BLKGRPCE	1	String	Current block group number
GEOID	12	String	Census block group identifier; a concatenation of the current state FIPS code, county FIPS code, census tract code, and block group number.
NAMELSAD	13	String	Current translated legal/statistical area description and the block group number
MTFCC	5	String	MAF/TIGER Feature Class Code (G5030)
FUNCSTAT	1	String	Current functional status
ALAND	14	Number	Current land area
AWATER	14	Number	Current water area
INTPTLAT	11	String	Current latitude of the internal point
INTPTLON	12	String	Current longitude of the internal point

Census Tracts:

Field	Length	Type	Description
STATEFP	2	String	Current state FIPS code
COUNTYFP	3	String	Current county FIPS code
TRACTCE	6	String	Current census tract code
GEOID	12	String	Census block group identifier; a concatenation of the current state FIPS code, county FIPS code, census tract code, and block group number.
NAMELSAD	13	String	Current translated legal/statistical area description and the block group number
MTFCC	5	String	MAF/TIGER Feature Class Code (G5030)
FUNCSTAT	1	String	Current functional status
ALAND	14	Number	Current land area
AWATER	14	Number	Current water area
INTPTLAT	11	String	Current latitude of the internal point
INTPTLON	12	String	Current longitude of the internal point