The American Community Survey (ACS) does not define "deaf" as an identity. Instead, it collects data based on functional abilities by asking, "Is this person deaf or does he/she have serious difficulty hearing?" It categorizes people broadly by disability type, asking about difficulties related to seeing, walking, remembering, dressing, or doing errands. For more information, see How Disability Data are Collected from The American Community Survey.

In the Dashboard:
We do our best to create categories based on terminology used in the community.

• deaf – Anyone who is deaf or has serious difficulty hearing.
• deafblind – Anyone who is deaf and blind, or deaf with difficulty seeing.
• deafdisabled – Anyone who is deaf and has any other disability (excluding blindness).
• deaf with no disability – Anyone who is deaf and reports no other disabilities.
• deaf with additional disabilities – Anyone who is deaf and reports one or more additional disabilities.

This dashboard uses racial and ethnic categories from the American Community Survey (ACS), based on how individuals self-identify. We recognize that these categories may not fully align with how members of deaf communities understand, experience, or wish to describe their racial or ethnic identities.

• Black or African American and white include those who selected only that race.
• Native American includes American Indian, Alaska Native, or a specific tribe.
• Asian includes Asian and Pacific Islander groups such as Chinese, Filipino, Korean, and Native Hawaiian.
• Latine includes people of Hispanic, Latino/a, or Spanish origin, which is collected separately from race in the ACS.
• Multiracial includes those who selected two or more races or another race not listed.

As federal data collection and reporting practices evolve, we will continue to review how race and ethnicity are represented in the dashboard to more accurately reflect the communities and cultures included in the data.

More information available from the U.S. Census Bureau: About the Topic of Race.

The data used in this dashboard come primarily from the American Community Survey (ACS), which currently collects sex information using only two categories: male and female. We acknowledge that these categories do not capture the full range of gender experiences within deaf communities. Discussions are underway at the federal level to expand data collection to include Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity questions, which would allow for more complete representation in the future. As data sources change, the dashboard will be updated accordingly.

State data report numbers are sourced from the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates, which provide a more precise representation by using a larger sample size. The national-level data used in the dashboard rely on ACS 1-year estimates to offer the most current employment and education rates. Therefore, you will notice small differences. For example, the deaf bachelor's or higher attainment rate is 23.9% for 2024 (national level tab) but it averages 21.2% from 2019-2023 (state level tab).

The federal government describes people without a job as people who are unemployed or not in the labor force. People who reported being currently, or recently, looking for work, are counted as unemployed. People who are not currently employed, and are not looking for work, are counted as not in the labor force. This latter group may include students, parents, caretakers, or retired people, for example.

This dashboard includes employment data for deaf people ages 16-64, commonly considered to be the working-age population, and education data for deaf people ages 25-64, used to calculate educational attainment rates. If you would like to learn more about deaf people younger than 16, check out Disability Statistics, Center for Research on Disability, or American Community Survey Table Generator.

According to the 2024 American Community Survey (ACS), about 3.8% of the U.S. population or 12.8M people consider themselves deaf or have serious difficulty hearing (all ages). More information at:

• Disability Statistics
• Center for Research on Disability
• American Community Survey Table Generator

The Hearing Loss Association of America estimates that 48 million Americans have some degree of hearing loss.

The American Community Survey collects information about how well a person speaks English, and allows people to write in the additional languages used in the home. The ACS does not ask about knowledge or use of sign language. For current estimates about sign language use, see Mitchell & Young, (2022).

The American Community Survey does not collect data about the type of school deaf people attend so we do not know which educational environment people in this sample had attended. For estimates about deaf students in different educational environments, see Palmer et al., 2020; IDEA Section 618 Data or OSEP Fast Facts (2022).

In each trend on the NDC dashboard, 2020 data point is missing because the response rate in that year was 71.2%, unusually low due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, policies aimed at slowing the spread of coronavirus (such as community-level stay-at-home orders) resulted in organizations adjusting their operations, which in turn complicated the ACS data collection.

Even with the Census Bureau applying mitigation measures to address collection disruptions and modifying the weighting adjustments, their assessment concluded that the estimates did not meet their criteria (as per the Census Bureau's Statistical Quality Standards). For example, in the 2020 ACS 1-Y data, the people with higher education, higher incomes, and who lived in single-family housing units were overrepresented. If you want to learn more about this, see ACS Research and Evaluation Report Memorandum Series #ACS21-RER-04.