DEC. 15, 2022 — The U.S. Census Bureau today announced modified confidentiality protections for the Current Population Survey Public-Use File (CPS PUF), which will be phased in beginning with the January 2023 panel. Earlier this year, the Census Bureau announced that it was deferring the application of proposed confidentiality protection changes for the 2022 CPS PUF to prevent disruption to data users and to retain characteristics that enable year-over-year comparisons. Taking into account feedback from a broad constituency of CPS PUF data users on a modified plan presented in July, including academic economists and researchers at the Federal Reserve, the Census Bureau has made adjustments to the original proposal to maximize utility of this important data source while fulfilling its legal obligations to protect the identity of survey respondents.

The need to strengthen protections on the CPS PUF resulted from a 2020 reidentification study that found significant vulnerabilities in select geographies. Rather than increase the population count threshold for publication of the data from 100,000 to 250,000 as initially proposed, the 2023 CPS PUF will retain the 100,000 population count threshold and partially synthesize data for riskier geographies. The new synthetic values allow preservation of the level of detail and many of the underlying relationships while providing the level of protection required. Changes will be phased in over 16 months until fully integrated. This is the same as presented in July.

Since July, the Census Bureau also modified its initial proposal for rounding wages to minimize impacts expressed by data users conducting wage analyses. Specifically, the upper boundary of our minimum rounding was raised to $30.00 for hourly wages to reflect the rising minimum wage. We also plan to update our weekly rounding to be better aligned with the hourly wage rounding, assuming a traditional 40-hour work week. The introduction of a new "dynamic" top-coding approach for wage and earnings data that will be applied to a weighted average of the top 3% of values on a monthly basis as presented in July.

The Census Bureau will continue to evaluate its methods for protecting the confidentiality of data provided by CPS respondents and welcomes feedback from data users as the production of CPS data moves forward. Technical details and data user notes will be available as part of the January 2023 release.

No news release associated with this announcement. Tip sheet only.

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