U.S. Neighborhoods Database

What do you consider to be a neighborhood?

A neighborhood is any named community within a city/town. Neighborhoods can overlap other neighborhoods. They can be a point or an area. They are subjective by nature, so people may disagree on neighborhood boundaries.

Do you consider subdivisions to be neighborhoods?

Sometimes. In older cities, neighborhoods tend to be well-defined, and we do not include subdivisions. In newer cities with less well-defined neighborhoods, we may include subdivisions as they act like neighborhoods.

Am I allowed to redistribute the database if I purchase a paid license?

No. You are not allowed to sell the database or make it publicly available. However, you can make copies and backups of the data. You are also allowed to query the database to power publicly facing applications, such as a store locator. To learn more, read the full license terms.

How often do you release updates?

Typically a few times a year. Upon purchase, you can elect to receive email alerts when we release new versions of the database.

Where does the demographic data come from?

Neighborhoods do not exist in any official capacity, so the U.S. Census does not collect demographic data on them directly. Instead, we impute each demographic value from our Census Tracts Database using a population-weighted area overlap: for every census tract that intersects a neighborhood, we take the share of the tract's population that falls within the overlapping area and weight that tract's values accordingly, then combine the weighted values from all overlapping tracts into a single estimate for the neighborhood. This lets us translate official, tract-level Census data onto neighborhood boundaries that the Census itself doesn't recognize. The underlying tract data comes from the 2024 American Community Survey (5-year estimate), run by the United States Census Bureau. You can browse the results for free, by city, on our neighborhood maps (e.g. median household income by neighborhood in Cincinnati).

Why is this product more expensive than your other databases?

Neighborhood boundaries are not well-tracked by the federal government. So, this database has required countless hours of manual labor collecting data from local agencies, original research, and data cleaning.

Why should I trust this data?

This database was aggregated from authoritative sources and carefully processed by SimpleMaps. We've been developing and selling interactive maps to Fortune 500 companies and prominent international organizations for over 16 years. Over this time, we've learned a lot about geographic data. To get a sense of the expertise and support we offer, check out some of the testimonials from our happy customers.

If I use the free database, what type of attribution is required?

If you use the Basic (free) database, you must link back to this page:
https://simplemaps.com/data/us-neighborhoods
from a public webpage where you are using the data. If you want to use the data internally, you must link back to this page from your firm's website on a page that can be easily found through links on the root domain. The link must be clearly visible to the human eye.

How do I calculate the distance between two neighborhoods?

We've published free formulas in popular programming languages. Check them out.

How do you determine which zip codes are in a neighborhood?

Our zip code data comes from our Zip Code Database. Most zip codes are Zip Code Tabulation Areas and are represented as a geographic area. We consider a ZCTA to be part of a neighborhood if the area intersecting both the ZCTA and neighborhood is at least 10 percent of the area of either the neighborhood or the ZCTA. This means that a ZCTA can be in more than one neighborhood. If this method does not result in a zip code, we will use the closest zip in the immediate area.

I only need neighborhood shapes for a single city, can I just buy those?

Yes, we sell single city data as a map product.

Do you have any sample data so that I can see what's included?

Yes, our neighborhood maps are generated using our neighborhood data and will give you a good sense of what's included for a given city.