US Census Geographic Boundaries

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Product Details

Visibility: Public
Owner: Carl Boettiger
Created: 16 Jun 2026
Last Updated: 16 Jun 2026

Product Contents

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README

US Census 2022 - Spatial Crosswalk (Tracts to H3)

This dataset provides a spatial index crosswalk between US Census Tracts (2022) and the H3 geospatial indexing system. It allows for efficient integration of census data with other H3-indexed datasets.

Note: This dataset currently contains only the geometry and identifiers (FIPS codes). It does not contain demographic attributes (population, income, etc.), which should be joined by FIPS code from the appropriate Census API or table.

Source

Producer: US Census Bureau (TIGER/Line Shapefiles)
Year: 2022
Level: Census Tract
Processing: Boettiger Lab (H3 Indexing)

Data Format

The dataset is partitioned by H3 resolution 0 index for efficient global querying.

Parquet: s3://public-census/year=2022/tracts-hex-z10.parquet
H3 Resolution: 10 (Average area ~0.015 km²)

Data Dictionary

Column	Type	Description
`FIPS`	String	11-digit Federal Information Processing Standards code uniquely identifying the census tract (State+County+Tract)
`h10`	List(String)	List of H3 resolution 10 indices that intersect with this tract
`STATE`	String	FIPS State Code
`COUNTY`	String	FIPS County Code
`year`	Integer	Census year (2022)
`geom`	Binary	WKB Geometry of the tract

Usage

Use this dataset as a "spine" to map tabular Census data to H3 hexagons.

Get Census Data: Download demographic data (e.g., ACS 5-year estimates) for 2022 tracts using the Census API or libraries like tidycensus / cenpy.
Join: Join your tabular data to this dataset on the FIPS column (ensure FIPS codes are formatted consistently as 11-character strings).
Spatial Analysis: Use the h10 column to aggregate or correlate with other H3 datasets.

Citation

U.S. Census Bureau. (2022). TIGER/Line Shapefiles. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/tiger-line-file.html