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MET2023
Metropolitan area (2023 delineations, identifiable areas only)
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Description

A metropolitan area, or metro area, is a region consisting of a large urban core together with surrounding communities that have a high degree of economic and social integration with the urban core.

MET2023 identifies metro areas of residence using the 2023 definitions for metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

MET2023 is available only for 2022 and later samples. For information about variables that provide metro area codes for other samples, see the overview page: IPUMS USA Variables for Metropolitan Areas.

Inexact Correspondence with Official Delineations
Since 1990, the only sub-state-level geographic information available in public-use census and ACS/PRCS microdata is for PUMAs, areas which occasionally straddle official metro area boundaries. Given this limitation,
MET2023 cannot identify the exact set of households residing in every metro area
.

The protocol used by MET2023 is to identify the metro area in which the majority of each PUMA's population resided. If MET2023 identifies a metro area for a given household, it indicates that, for the PUMA where the household resided, a majority of the PUMA's population resided in the identified metro area.

Match Errors and Code Suppression
MET2023's code assignment protocol yields errors of omission (residents of a MSA who are not identified as residents) and errors of commission (non-residents who are identified as residents). PUMAs often nest well within metro area boundaries, resulting in small match errors, if any. For many metro areas, however, especially smaller metro areas, the intersecting PUMAs are a poor match.

As an index of mismatch, IPUMS uses the sum of percent omission error (the portion of an MSA's population residing in excluded PUMAs) and percent commission error (the portion of the population in associated PUMAs that did not reside in the MSA).


MET2023 reports no code for MSAs where the sum of match errors is 15% or more.

For each reported MET2023 code, the MET2023ERR variable identifies the level of the sum of errors. Researchers may use MET2023ERR to impose a more restrictive error limit if desired.

To compute match errors, IPUMS uses 2020 populations for 2022-2031 ACS and PRCS samples.

For detailed information about 2023 MSA delineations and their correspondence with PUMAs, see the 2023 MSA geographic resource page.