About Demografics
Free US Census trade-area reports for retail site selection
Demografics turns public US Census data into trade-area reports for a specific address. Enter any US location and a radius (1, 3, 5 or 10 miles) and it combines the American Community Survey figures for every census tract in that circle: how many people live there, their household incomes, ages, housing and the industries they work in. It is built for people deciding where to open or move a store: independent retailers, franchise owners, telecom dealers, restaurant operators and the brokers who advise them.
We built it because this kind of analysis is usually locked inside expensive commercial tools, while the underlying data is published free by the Census Bureau. The hard part is not the data but turning tract-level tables into an answer for one location. Demografics does that step automatically and shows its working.
What you can do with it
- Site reports: population, income brackets, age groups, ethnicity, renters vs owners and residents' jobs by industry for any US address and radius.
- Category fit: a rule-based check of how well an area matches the typical customer profile of eight kinds of business, from prepaid wireless stores to cafes, gyms and grocery.
- Competitor lookups: nearby businesses of the same type, from Google Places, with distance and ratings.
- Area scans: scores a grid of locations across a city to find areas with a good customer profile and few competitors.
- Site comparison: two to four addresses side by side.
- Data studies: original articles analysing Census data across major US cities and metros.
Where the data comes from
- US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates (2018–2022), at census tract level.
- US Census Bureau TIGERweb 2020 tract boundaries, to find the tracts inside each radius.
- Google Places, for nearby competitor listings.
- Google Gemini, only to write plain-English summaries from the figures; it does not produce any of the numbers.
Every calculation, approximation and limitation is documented in How Demografics calculates trade-area demographics. In short: census figures describe residents, not daytime visitors; they are survey estimates with margins of error; and our scores are transparent rules of thumb, not sales forecasts.
How our data studies are made
Each article on the blog is generated from Census data by a script, so every figure in the text and tables is calculated rather than typed by hand. We check the inputs before publishing (for example, that each city is measured from its actual City Hall) and explain the method and sources in every article. When the Census Bureau releases new data, the studies can be regenerated and updated.
Free during launch
Demografics is free while we launch. Guests can run 5 searches a day; a free account gives 30 days of unlimited reports. See the FAQ for details, and our privacy policy for how account data is handled.
Contact
Questions, corrections or partnership ideas: Nasim.Farhan@gmail.com. If you spot an error in a report or article, please tell us; we correct published figures.