The purpose of the 2020 Census Group Quarters operations was to enumerate people living, staying, or receiving services in all types of group quarters in the United States and Puerto Rico. A group quarters (or GQ) is a place where people live or stay in a group living arrangement that is owned or managed by an entity or organization providing housing or other services for their residents. These other services may include custodial or medical care as well as other types of assistance. Residency is commonly restricted to those receiving the services.

The Census Bureau conducted multiple operations to count people living in GQs and to count people without conventional housing and those experiencing homelessness. The Group Quarters Enumeration (GQE) operation focused on counting people who lived in places such as college or university student housing, residential treatment centers, nursing facilities (nursing homes) or skilled nursing facilities (facilities providing 24-hour, 7 days per week skilled nursing care), group homes, correctional facilities, and workers’ dormitories. The Service Based Enumeration (SBE) operation concentrated on counting people without conventional housing and people experiencing homelessness at places where they receive services and at preidentified outdoor locations. Service-based GQs include outdoor locations where people experiencing homelessness stay, known as targeted non-sheltered outdoor locations (TNSOLs), and places where people receive services: shelters, soup kitchens, and regularly scheduled mobile food vans, also known as service-based locations. There were additional operations conducted by the Census Bureau in advance of GQE and SBE to create the address universe for each operation and to help prepare GQ contact persons and field staff for the upcoming enumeration activities. The Census Bureau also conducted a telephone operation after GQE to follow up with nonresponding GQ contacts.

There were 8.4 million people enumerated during the GQE and SBE operations across more than 184,000 GQs. Among these were more than half a million people enumerated at more than 24,000 service-based locations. College and university student housing had the highest number of people enumerated across GQ types.

Some key recommendations identified for those planning future GQ operations are as follows: use a single operating system across all GQ operations for consistency; prioritize frame development throughout the decade to update GQ address information; and automate data collection to reduce the need for paper data capture and other quality assurance activities.