Name Look-Up Tables Description

Overview

The Census Bureau's Redistricting Data Products provide the states and other data users with the small area census data necessary for legislative redistricting. Among the geographic products disseminated for the 2010 Census are the Block Assignment Files (BAFs) and corresponding Name Look-up Tables (NLTs).

NLTs have been created for each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico and work in conjunction with the BAFs. Every NLT contains the names and codes of every geographic area of the specific type within the state. If no records of the geographic area type exist within the state, the NLT will only display the field header.

File Naming Convention

The file naming convention is as follows:

NAMES_ST<ss>_<USPSabbrev>_<entity>.txt

where <ss> is the 2-character state FIPS code, <USPSabbrev> is the 2-letter U.S. Postal Service (USPS) state abbreviation, and <entity> is the geography area type being represented.

File Format

NLTs are pipe (|) delimited text (.txt) files. The first line of each NLT is the field header. The 10 types of NLTs and the fields they contain are described below:

Geographic Area	<entity>	Field Layout
Congressional districts	CD	STATEFP,DISTRICT,NAME,NAMELSAD
State legislative districts - upper	SLDU	STATEFP,DISTRICT,NAME,NAMELSAD
State legislative districts - lower	SLDL	STATEFP,DISTRICT,NAME,NAMELSAD
Voting districts	VTD	STATEFP,COUNTYFP,DISTRICT,NAME,NAMELSAD
Elementary school districts	SDELM	STATEFP,DISTRICT,NAME,NAMELSAD
Secondary school districts	SDSEC	STATEFP,DISTRICT,NAME,NAMELSAD
Unified school districts	SDUNI	STATEFP,DISTRICT,NAME,NAMELSAD
Incorporated places	INCPLACE	STATEFP,PLACEFP,NAME,NAMELSAD
Census designated places	CDP	STATEFP,PLACEFP,NAME,NAMELSAD
American Indian / Alaska Native / Native Hawaiian areas	AIANNH	STATEFP,AIANNHCE,NAME,NAMELSAD

Field Definitions

Field definitions are as follows:

STATEFP: 2-character state FIPS code

DISTRICT: variable length code representing the district (i.e., geographic area)
- CD - 2-character code
- SLDU - 3-character code
- SLDL - 3-character code
- VTD - variable length code of up to 6 characters
- SDELM - 5-character code
- SDSEC - 5-character code
- SDUNI - 5-character code

PLACEFP: 5-character place FIPS code

AIANNHCE: 4-character American Indian / Alaska Native / Native Hawaiian (AIANNH) area census code

COUNTYFP: 3-character county FIPS code

NAME: variable length geographic area name (e.g., Atlanta)

NAMELSAD: concatenated variable length geographic area name and legal/statistical area description (LSAD) (e.g., Atlanta city)