Disability Status (ACS)

Limitations

Disability here is the ACS survey definition - serious difficulty with hearing, vision, cognition, walking, self-care, or independent living, self- or proxy-reported - NOT the schools' 'students with disabilities' (IDEA special-education eligibility). Not every question is asked at every age: under 5 only hearing and vision, 5-17 all but independent living, so the youngest brackets measure a narrower definition. Universe: the civilian noninstitutionalized population, which EXCLUDES people in nursing homes, prisons and other institutions and active-duty military - material for the 75_plus bracket and for counties with large institutional populations. Race/ethnicity is served on the topic-specific race_iteration column, NOT the demographic axis, and only for all sexes and all ages (subject table S1810 publishes no race-by-sex or race-by-age figures): 'white' is White alone NOT Hispanic and 'hispanic' is Hispanic of any race, but the other groups are race-ALONE groups that INCLUDE Hispanic members, so the iterations overlap and never sum to 'all' (the White-alone-including-Hispanic row is not served). demographic carries sex (all/male/female); demographic and age_bracket are exact partitions. num_one_disability and num_two_plus_disabilities (table C18108) are served only on the total row (all sexes, all ages, all races): C18108 has no sex or race split and its age bands (under 18, 18-64, 65+) differ from age_bracket. disability_rate is derived from the published counts (it can differ from the Census's published one-decimal percent by rounding). Margins: every population and with-a-disability margin is published (B18101 cells or S1810, whose aggregate counts equal the B18101 sums); disability_rate_moe is S1810's published percent margin on the total, sex, age and race rows (capped by the Census at 100 points) and is derived with the Census ratio formula on the 12 sex-by-age rows (a 0 or 100 percent rate takes the Census's own model margin; a derived margin above 1.0 is set to NULL); the C18108 split's margins are the Census sqrt-sum-of-squares approximation over its three age cells. A NULL rate means the group's universe estimate is 0 in the geography: no one in the group was sampled there, which is not proof there are none (and not suppression). ACS 5-year period estimates: the year column is the vintage END year and each estimate pools five years of survey responses (2024 = 2020-2024). Consecutive vintages share about 80% of their sample, so the series is heavily smoothed - never difference overlapping vintages as if they were annual change. Estimates are survey-based and carry 90% margins of error (the *_moe columns); tract-level margins can be large relative to the estimate. All levels serve vintages 2020-2024 only, on 2020-vintage tract boundaries. State rows have NULL county_fips, district_code, and tract_geoid; county rows carry only county_fips, district rows only district_code, tract rows only tract_geoid. District rows cover the ~180 standard (city/county) districts only: the Census publishes school-district estimates at unified school district geography, which has no codes for charter schools, RESAs, or state agencies, and its few Census-only districts (e.g. the Fort Stewart military district) have no GCD district code and are dropped.