The U.S. Census Bureau collects information from persons, households, and businesses in approximately 130 surveys every year. Once a decade, it gathers core demographic information on the entire U.S. population via the Decennial Census.

The Master Demographics project is a pilot to create a core set of high-quality demographics on any person who has ever been surveyed by the Census Bureau between 2000 and the present. The project has 3 goals:

• Improve business processes and efficiencies within the Bureau so that we can better respond to customer and client needs,
• Improve our ability to find and study small populations to become better informed about their needs and status,
• Create high-quality master demographics for as many people as possible, which can then be linked to administrative records from other federal agencies to help them better understand the populations they serve.