50 Free Datasets in 50 Minutes. National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 6, 2025: “Below are federal government datasets with individual-level structured data that can be downloaded for free as Excel or CSV files and localized to any city, county or state in the United States. Unless noted, all the data is updated and can be used to analyze trends, as well as comparisons for your community to the rest of your state, or nation. Some datasets include addresses or longitude/latitude to enable mapping. Most of the datasets are available directly from the government agency, but we have provided other datasets that reputable data journalists or organizations have acquired, often through FOIA, cleaned up and provided to you for free (e.g., Data Liberation Project, started by Jeremy Singer-Vine and now coordinated by MuckRock and Big Local News). All of these datasets empower you to localize federal-level
data to your community. Links can be dynamic and ever changing, so if one ends up being broken, Google to find its new location. Also, we provide the actual URL so you can put it in the Internet Archive to see what the website contained in the past. Some datasets can be pretty complicated, but most sites provide code sheets and data dictionaries to explain the content. Also, in many cases, tipsheets from previous IRE/NICAR conferences available at the IRE Resource Center go into depth in how to interpret the data, and the pros, cons, limitations and pitfalls of particular datasets…

Search websites of data gatherers who have already pulled together federal datasets and posted them online, then acquire the data yourself. They include the Data Liberation Project, Data is Plural, the Accountability Project, MuckRock, Kaggle, Google Dataset Search, GovernmentAttic.org, ProPublica (check their archived data store list, which isn’t updated, but provides good ideas), and Big Local News…”