Bureau plans to use mail carriers in census test already facing criticism

Even though some doubts have been raised about its effectiveness, the U.S. Census Bureau is trying out whether to use U.S. postal carriers as census takers this spring during a test of the 2030 head count in two southern cities — a practice run already facing criticism over last-minute changes by the Trump administration.

Starting in June, dozens of postal carriers in Spartanburg, South Carolina and Huntsville, Alabama will ask personal questions about race, ethnicity and the relationships of residents in households that haven’t responded to a test census questionnaire online. Invitations to respond to the test online go out to 154,600 residents in both cities starting May 1, according to new details the Census Bureau released Monday.

The practice run is meant to try out new methods for the once-a-decade census, which determines political power and the distribution of federal funds.

“They typically think that it’s kind of a cool thing that they’re a little bit of a guinea pig,” said Brian Renfroe, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers.

In Spartanburg, 25 postal workers participating in the pilot will knock on doors and ask the census test questions of households along their routes. They will identity themselves as postal workers and be paid their normal U.S. Postal Service pay rate. The average hourly wage for a postal carrier was $28.79 in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Non-postal worker census takers are being paid $17.75 an hour in Spartanburg.

In Huntsville, the Census Bureau plans to recruit 25 volunteer postal workers who will collect responses from households outside of their regular mail-delivering work hours, in the evenings or on weekends. They will identity themselves as Census Bureau employees and be paid the same rate of $19.75 an hour as other census takers.

Adding census questions to their routines will just be one of several elements like the weather, traffic and the amount of letters or packages needing delivery that postal carriers calculate into their workloads each day, Renfroe said.

“Letter carriers, they know their people,” he said. “You’ve got kind of some trust already built in there.”

The idea of using postal carriers to ask in-person census questions has been kicking around for decades by supporters who say it would leverage an existing workforce and utilize postal carriers’ knowledge of the households along their routes.

The Government Accountability Office determined in 2011 that using mail carriers to do the work of census takers wouldn’t be cost-effective since they’re paid significantly more than the temporary census workers.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose department oversees the Census Bureau, views using postal carriers as cheaper than hiring temporary census takers since they are at residents’ homes daily, Postmaster General David Steiner said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The census takers “are going back three and four times and five and six times to the same house until they can find someone there,” Steiner recalled Lutnick saying in a conversation. “Who would they rather speak to? Someone that just shows up at their door or their mail carrier who they see every day, they probably trust very much, they probably know.”

But the Census Bureau has failed to show how using postal carriers will save money or increase efficiency, 21 Democratic state attorneys general said earlier this month in a letter to the Commerce Department.

A pilot program to use postal workers similar to the 2026 test was planned for the 2018 census test in Rhode Island, ahead of the 2020 census, but was canceled over conflicting confidentiality requirements by the Census Bureau and Postal Service. A household’s address and whether it was vacant or not would be considered confidential information, unable to be disclosed, under Census Bureau confidentiality provisions. But the postal service is allowed to disclose that information to law enforcement or other agencies under its rules.

The Census Bureau said Monday that postal workers taking part in the 2026 census test would adhere to all Census Bureau confidentiality provisions. They also will undergo the same training as Census Bureau census takers and take “an oath for life” to protect respondents’ confidentiality, the bureau said.

The Trump administration made last-minute changes to the 2026 census test that advocates worry bodes trouble for the 2030 head count. Four other test locations were eliminated; the online response to the questionnaire was narrowed to English instead of English, Spanish and Chinese; and the test is utilizing questions from the American Community Survey, which has a citizenship question, instead of a much-shorter traditional census form.

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