In 2018, in collaboration with Opportunity Insights, the Census Bureau constructed and released the Opportunity Atlas, a comprehensive Census tract-level dataset of children’s outcomes in adulthood using data covering nearly the entire U.S. population. For each tract, we estimated children’s outcomes in adulthood such as earnings distributions and incarceration rates by parental income, race/ethnicity, and sex. These estimates allow the public to trace the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration to the neighborhoods in which children grew up. The statistics in the Opportunity Atlas focused on adult outcomes of children born in between 1978-1983 at the tract level. This original data release is now called “Module 1: Neighborhood Mobility Outcomes.” The original release of the Opportunity Atlas was accompanied by a research paper entitled “The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility.”

In 2024, we capitalized on an additional decade of data to not only support the public, scholars, and policy makers in understanding where and for whom opportunity exists, but also how it is changing over time and within places. We provide new publicly available data on changes in mobility by county, birth cohort (1978-1992), race, class (parental income), and sex, as well as a new interactive module within the Opportunity Atlas called “Module 2: County & Metro Mobility Trends,” that allows users to explore mobility trends in counties. The new statistics documenting county mobility trends is accompanied by a research paper entitled, “Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility.”

Module 1: Neighborhood Mobility Outcomes

• Executive Summary
• Slides
• Full Paper

Module 1 Data Tables

Module 2: County & Commuting Zone Mobility Trends

• Slides
• Full Paper

Module 2 Data Tables