Socioeconomic and Demographic Covariate Data for Mortality Research: Key Updates Since the 2025 Report

Overview

This Society of Actuaries Research Institute report highlights updates to the merged dataset that compiles a wide range of socioeconomic and demographic variables from the American Community Survey (ACS) and the Decennial Census. The dataset is organized at the county, state, and national levels and is designed to support future research on mortality heterogeneity by providing consistent, well-documented covariates commonly used in mortality modeling. This report focuses on the updates made since 2025.

Understanding the relationship between mortality and socioeconomic factors is essential for promoting equity, improving risk assessment and supporting data-driven product and policy development. This dataset provides a validated set of covariates that can be linked with external mortality outcomes to support a wide range of actuarial and public health analyses.

Key Updates

The updates to the report include the following:

• The American Community Survey (ACS) dataset has been updated to the 2020-2024 ACS 5-year release, including national, state, and county-level output updates.
• The interpretation of year in outputs has been revised and now refers to the ACS release year.
• Inflation adjustment factors have been added for dollar-denominated variables, such as median household income and housing cost measures.
• Changes documented in county and county-equivalent geographies across ACS releases.
• Additional validation procedures were added, including checks for geographic consistency, large year-to-year changes, and consistency between county, state, and national outputs.
• The ACS workflow now has centralized release settings, variable mappings for the latest release, and appending of validated single-release outputs into the full time-series files.

Acknowledgements

The researchers’ deepest gratitude goes to those without whose efforts this project could not have come to fruition: the Project Oversight Group and others for their diligent work overseeing the dataset development and reviewing this report for substance and relevance.

Project Oversight Group Members

• Magali Barbieri, PhD
• Jean-Marc Fix, FSA, MAAA
• Robert M. Gomez, FSA, CERA, MAAA
• John W. Robinson, FSA, MAAA

At the Society of Actuaries Research Institute

• Barbara Scott, Senior Research Administrator
• Lisa A. Schilling, FSA, EA, FCA, MAAA, Director of Practice Research