Congressional Districts

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Congressional Districts

Written by:

The Redistricting and Voting Rights Data Office (contact rdo@census.gov or 301-763-4039)

The tabs below represent the unique congressional sessions as collected by the U.S. Census Bureau through the Redistricting Data Program. Each tab contains information specific to that session's boundary collection along with other relevant products generated in support of any changes. Typically, new products are generated only when changes to congressional districts are reported between sessions. Any changes to congressional plans are submitted to the Census Bureau by non-partisan state liaisons, identified by the governor and legislative leadership of each state at the beginning of each decade's Redistricting Data Program. Once these plans are processed and inserted into the MAF/TIGER database, the Census Bureau generates verification materials for each state to review and certify as accurate. Any reported changes to the verification materials were incorporated into these final products.

Congressional districts are generally included as part of the standard set of geographies for which decennial census and American Community Survey (ACS) 1-Year and 5-Year estimates data are produced. These data are available on data.census.gov. Selected other data products produced specifically for congressional and state legislative districts are referenced in the relevant tabs below, and are also available from data.census.gov.

117th Congress

The U.S. Census Bureau's Redistricting Data Program does not collect the congressional and state legislative district boundaries for the cycle that aligns with the decennial census. The 117th Congressional and 2020 State Legislative District boundaries, therefore, were not collected as they are the cycle that aligned with the 2020 Census.

When the Census Bureau collects congressional and state legislative districts, they are inserted into our MAF/TIGER geographic database. This allows the boundaries to be reflected in tabulation and geographic products.

North Carolina was the only state that had changes to their congressional districts between the 116th and 117th Congresses. Since those changes were not collected by the Census Bureau, census data were not tabulated for the 117th Congressional Districts, and most geographic products were not updated with the new boundaries. Since there were no changes reported between the 116th and 117th Congresses for other states, the 116th congressional district boundaries and spatial data can be considered the same as those for the 117th Congress for those states.

The state of North Carolina was able to provide the Census Bureau with a shapefile of the new congressional district boundaries in their state, which allowed Census Bureau cartographers to generate map products reflecting the 117^th Congressional District boundaries.

For more information about the changes to congressional districts in North Carolina for the 117th Congress, please visit the North Carolina General Assembly's webpage. Please note that the boundaries on their website are those enacted in 2019.