State and County-Level Response Rates – Week ending April 5

  North Carolina: Census 2020 Real-Time Response Rates – Week ending April 5 (.pdf)

  View All County-Level Response Rates – Week ending April 5

Key takeaways for week ending April 5

1. North Carolina’s overall response rate is 42%. By the start of the third week of Census reporting, North Carolina’s self-response rank had risen 6 spots from the first reporting date to 37 out of 50 states and DC.  Nationally, 45% of households have responded to the Census.
2. NC’s online response rate continues to lag behind the nation. North Carolina’s online self-response rate is 35.7% – 3.6 percentage points lower than the national average (39.3%). This is an important roadblock, as online responses form the overwhelming majority of all responses both statewide and nationally.
3. North Carolinians are more likely to respond by mail or phone than the national average. For the past three weeks of reporting, a larger share of North Carolina households have responded by mail or phone (6%) than the nation (5.2%), and this disparity continues to rise.
4. All five top-responding counties in North Carolina are located in a metropolitan area. These are Orange, Union, Wake, Chatham, and Guilford counties.
5. The five lowest-responding counties likely impacted by suspension of Census Bureau field operations. Graham, Avery, Jackson, Dare, and Swain counties had high proportions of households that will be counted by “Update/Leave”—most of these households have not yet received their invitation to respond to the census.
6. Response lags in Census tracts with the largest minority populations. In census tracts where 50% or more of residents were non-white, the average response rate of 37.4% lagged the state average by 4.3 percentage points.
7. Census tracts with low household internet access had the lowest response rates. In census tracts where over 31% of households lacked internet, the average response rate was 36.4% – a gap of 5.3 percentage points from the state average. In contrast, in tracts with the highest rates of internet access, nearly half (49%) of households had completed the census.
8. Responses also lag behind the state in tracts with largest and smallest child populations. In census tracts where either less than 4.1% of residents or over 7.2% of residents were ages 0-4, the average response rate fell below the state average. This gap was largest for census tracts with the smallest child population (-1.8 percentage points). This may be related to poor response in areas such as college towns, where displacement due to COVID-19 is highest.
9. Tracts with highest immigrant populations have highest average response rates. Tracts where 9.8% or more of the population is foreign-born had the highest average response rate (43.3%), followed by tracts with 5.7% to 9.8% foreign-born residents (43.1%). Tracts with few immigrants (<2.9% of residents) had the lowest average response rate (38.5%).

Last updated: 4.7.20