JAN. 24, 2024 — The U.S. Census Bureau today announced it has completed two operations that allowed governmental units to seek review of their 2020 Census counts. The Census Bureau officially notified all participants of the Count Question Resolution (CQR) and 2020 Post-Census Group Quarters Review (PCGQR) operations of review results by Jan. 3.

The CQR operation gave tribal, state and local governments the opportunity to ask the Census Bureau to review their boundaries or housing counts to identify errors that may have occurred while processing their 2020 Census counts. PCGQR offered the governments a new, one-time opportunity to request the Census Bureau review group quarters population counts as of Census Day or April 1, 2020, that they believed were not counted correctly. The results are then incorporated into the Census Bureau’s annual population estimates. Note that not all submitted requests were approved in full, and the resulting changes may be smaller than requested.

In all, CQR received 123 review requests (between Jan. 3, 2022, and June 30, 2023) and PCGQR received 74 requests (between June 6, 2022, and June 30, 2023). 

The original goal was to send all final notifications by Sept. 30, 2023, but the Census Bureau extended the review after receiving a high number of cases at the submission deadline. 

The Census Bureau will publicly release the CQR results, including corrected population and housing unit counts, on a flow-basis to 2020 Decennial Census Notes and Errata over the next few months.

The confidentiality requirements of Title 13 prohibit the Census Bureau from disclosing which portions of a government’s PCGQR submission were considered to be in scope and accepted, including to the government that submitted the request. Because of this constraint, the Census Bureau has notified each government about whether their submission was “approved,” but it cannot provide (and has not provided) any information about which parts of a submission were accepted. In other words, as stated on the PCGQR website, an approval means that at least some part of the submission was found to be in scope and accepted for a correction. Only the accepted parts of a submission will be reflected in the annual population estimates, which may result in changes to the annual population estimates that are lower than originally requested in a PCGQR submission.

Localities may approximate the combined CQR/PCGQR impact on results by comparing the population estimate for April 1, 2020, from the updated vintages of the population estimates (as they become available) with the previous vintage. The Vintage 2023 estimates incorporate the CQR and PCGQR results decided earlier in the process. Currently, the state and national level Vintage 2023 estimates are available, with local estimates scheduled for release through June. Now that CQR and PCGQR are complete, the remaining results will be incorporated in the forthcoming Vintage 2024 estimates scheduled for release from December 2024 through June 2025. More information is available on the full release schedule.

Please note that the April 1, 2020, population estimate may also reflect changes resulting from geographic updates and the application of disclosure avoidance to protect confidentiality.

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