This page documents changes made to the Upward Mobility Data Dashboard and Mobility Metrics data.
Updates
Updated May 13, 2025:
Pay on an average job compared with the cost of living
Starting in 2023, living wage estimates use an updated methodology that will make it easier to compare estimates across years going forward. Data for 2023 include (and data for years after 2023 are expected to include) new civic engagement and internet and mobile cost categories and an improved child care cost calculation. As a result, data from before 2023 may not be comparable with data from 2023 and after.
Share of adults with debt in collections
Starting in 2022, the three nationwide credit-reporting companies made significant changes to medical debt reporting. These changes reduced the share of people with medical debt in collections reported on their credit records but not necessarily the overall share of people with medical debt in collections. As a result, data from 2022 and later may not be comparable with data from before 2022.
Share of households with a computer and broadband internet subscription in the home
For all years, we replaced digital access data with new data based on our updated definitions of internet access and internet-accessible devices. Households with digital access are now defined as households where any member was subscribed to a broadband (high speed) internet service and where any member owned or used any of a list of devices that includes desktop computers and other portable wireless computers such as laptops and tablets. Smartphone devices and internet access via satellite, dial-up, and cell phone data plan, which were included in our original calculation, are now excluded.
Number of affordable and available housing units per 100 households with low, very low, and extremely low incomes
We made multiple corrections to all years of data for this metric, including fixing errors in a conditional logic statement, in deduplication of the microdata (which affected less than 1 percent of the microdata records), and in the coding of missing data. We also fixed an error that was leading to inconsistent treatment of the Chugach and Copper River census areas in Alaska. In addition, we updated income limits to interpolate based on 2020 populations instead of 2017 populations and adjusted Connecticut data to be organized by planning region (instead of county) for 2022 and later years.
Share of public-school children who are ever homeless during the school year
The shares of students experiencing homelessness during the school year by race and ethnicity were added back to the dashboard after temporary removal in December 2024 (see below)
Economic connectedness index
Values for this metric are now presented as the percentage of high-income friends among low-income people, instead of as a ratio reflecting the extent to which people of different socioeconomic statuses are friends with one another. The underlying data remain unchanged.
Share of commuters who use public transit
We shifted from using a percentile-ranked transit trips index to using the share of commuters who use public transit. The new measure is easier to interpret and better reflects community members’ perceptions of public transit availability.
Deaths due to injury
For all years of data, we shifted from using age-adjusted mortality rates to crude mortality rates because of a lack of available data. More information on age-adjusted and crude rates can be found in CDC WONDER’S documentation.
Updated December 24, 2024:
Share of households with a computer and broadband internet subscription in the home
We originally offered annual data points from 2017 to 2022 (excluding 2020) based on five-year American Community Survey (ACS) data. However, we had only intended to show every other year so that over time, data would have more new information (at least two years of new data out of the five). Therefore, we removed data from 2017, 2019, and 2022 to align with the years that we are supplying for other metrics based on five-year ACS data. This update results in having two data points: 2018 and 2021. We will be adding 2023 data in our next round of updates.
Updated December 3, 2024:
Share of public-school children who are ever homeless during the school year
We removed the race/ethnicity subgroup data for the “Share of public-school children who are ever homeless during the school year” from the data dashboard. It was removed because the table notes did not indicate a shift in the denominator between the overall metric value to the subgroup metric values, which caused confusion around the interpretation of the subgroup results. Users are still able to see the number of public-school children experiencing homelessness by race/ethnicity. The display of the “share” by race and ethnicity data for this metric will be reevaluated and presented in the future.
Updated September 10, 2024:
We replaced the Mobility Metric data tables with an interactive data dashboard and expanded the Mobility Metrics, including by adding years of data, categories, and metrics with calculated confidence intervals with lower- and upper-bound values. These updates differ by metric, but a list of what is available in the dashboard can be found in the dashboard appendix under each metric’s “Available Data” section.
