Data USA

About Data USA

Data USA provides a public API for querying US public data, built on a Tesseract server backend. It exposes endpoints for listing available data cubes, retrieving a cube's schema (measures, dimensions, and levels), listing the distinct members of a dimension level, and fetching the underlying data itself. Data can be filtered by dimension values, limited and paginated, and grouped using drilldowns to select which dimensions appear as columns in the response.

The main data endpoint supports multiple output formats, including CSV, TSV, Parquet, Excel (xlsx), and two JSON variants (array-of-arrays and array-of-objects). Responses include annotations describing the dataset's source and topic, pagination metadata, a list of columns, and the data records themselves. Queries can include or exclude specific members of a dimension to control which categories are considered when aggregating measures.

The API is intended for developers and researchers who want programmatic access to Data USA's underlying datasets, such as population figures by state and year, rather than using the site's visualizations directly.

Key features

• Query US public data via REST endpoints returning JSON, CSV, TSV, Parquet, or Excel
• Explore available datasets through the /cubes and /cubes/{name} endpoints
• Filter results with include/exclude parameters on any dimension member
• Discover filterable values for a dimension via the /members endpoint
• Drilldown and measure query parameters let users select dimensions and metrics to return
• Responses include metadata annotations like source name, topic, and dataset description

Frequently asked questions