pumsdata updates
Two things changed on pumsdata this month. The site now has paid plans, and it has a research arm that publishes finished reports. Every public data page stays free to browse, exactly as before. What is paid is the analysis tooling on top of the data, and the research we write ourselves. This post covers both.
Paid plans
The data pages, the maps, and the articles remain free, with no account required. The plans cover the analysis tools: cross-tab queries over the microdata, exports, saved views, and prior-year comparisons. There are three tiers and a day pass:
- Free gives you 5 queries a month with short result previews. Enough to see what the query builder does with your question.
- Pro ($79.99 a month, or $49.99 a month billed annually) adds unlimited queries, full result tables, every prior year, copy and paste, and 10 exports a month.
- Unlimited ($174.99 a month) removes the export and row limits entirely, up to what a spreadsheet can hold.
- The Usage Pass ($45) buys 24 hours of unmetered querying with 5 exports. It exists for the single afternoon of real work that does not justify a subscription.
Full details are on the pricing page. If your account existed before the plans launched, nothing changes for you: it keeps full access, free. That is a promise, not a trial.
The research arm
Where the explorer hands you a figure, a report hands you a decision. It is the same public data, read, ranked, and written up to answer one question a team is paid to get right. We are launching with five reports, all built on datasets already on the site: Census microdata, building permits, HUD income limits and Fair Market Rents, wages, home prices, migration, and schools. Nothing here sits behind a data license. The work is in the assembly.
Each report is a one-time purchase, delivered as a print-quality PDF that is yours to keep. No subscription, no seat, no expiry. Each answers a specific decision for a specific reader, and each shows its own limits: the coverage, the base years, and the method are on the page before you buy. You can read the free portion of any of them right now.
Where tax-credit housing pencils: the maximum LIHTC rent every county allows, set against the market rent next door, plus income-qualified renter demand and the supply gap. It is the calculation the sector runs every day and no public source publishes, worked out for every county in all 51 states.
For: LIHTC, workforce and build-to-rent developers, their syndicators and lenders, and the housing agencies and consultants who screen the same markets.
Where to build next: permits, population, prices and school demand for every U.S. county of 50,000-plus residents and every permitting city, ranked into a single development-opportunity view instead of five separate downloads.
For: Land acquisition and market-selection teams at homebuilders, multifamily and build-to-rent developers, and the capital that funds them.
Where American wealth sits and where it is forming: all 51 states measured, ranked and profiled, and every neighborhood-scale market screened for the deepest, fastest-growing and most equity-rich pools of affluent households, drawn from Census household microdata.
For: Financial advisors and wealth-management teams choosing where to build, place or expand a practice, from national firms allocating territory to regional practices weighing a second market.
The regional edition of the wealth series: where affluent households concentrate, where they are growing, and where a new practice finds its clients, mapped down to the neighborhood across the Nashville metro and Middle Tennessee.
For: Financial advisors building or growing a practice across Nashville and Middle Tennessee.
Where America's people, jobs, homes and paychecks moved between 2020 and 2026: every state ranked, every claim sourced, down to the neighborhood. This is the general-purpose reference behind the more specialized reports above.
For: Site selectors, economic developers, relocation and expansion advisors, and policy staff who need one defensible national reference.
You can see all five, side by side, on the research page.
Research on request
Not every question fits a shelf report. The same team also takes commissioned work: a custom edition for a market we have not published, a screening pass across a specific footprint, or a one-off analysis on the datasets behind all of this. If that is you, the research page has the details, or write to research@pumsdata.com and tell us the decision you are trying to make.
How pumsdata compares
Plenty of tools sell demographic and market data. Three things set pumsdata apart:
- Low cost. Platforms in this space are usually sold as annual enterprise seats, priced in the thousands and quoted over a sales call. Here the top tier is $174.99 a month, you see the price before you sign up, and you can cancel any time.
- Easy access. There is no demo to book and no procurement to clear. The data pages are open without an account, a subscription starts in the browser in a minute, and a report can be bought as a guest with nothing but an email address.
- Inexpensive research. A commissioned market study costs thousands of dollars, in part because the analyst has to find, buy, and clean the data before the analysis starts. We skip that step: every report is built on the same datasets that already run the site, so you pay for the analysis alone. That is why the reports run from $149 to $749 instead of a consultant's invoice.
Why we made these changes
The principle behind both changes is the same: reading is free, work product is paid. Anyone can browse any data page, check a number, and cite it. What costs money is what turns the data into your work: the query tools that build a custom cross-tab, the export that lands in your spreadsheet, and the reports where we did the sourcing, the ranking, and the judgment for you. That is what keeps the site running, and it is a better model than ads or selling access to the data itself, which is public and should stay that way.
As always, the underlying data comes from public sources: the Census Bureau, HUD, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and others named in each report. pumsdata is an independent product and is not affiliated with any of them.