The U.S. Census Bureau said it will conduct a spring practice test for the 2030 head count in two southern cities by using U.S. postal carriers to ask certain in-person questions to households that have not responded to an online questionnaire. The bureau said the approach will help test new methods for the once-a-decade census, which it says helps determine political power and the distribution of federal funds.
The bureau said the online portion of the test begins May 1, with invitations going out to 154,600 residents across Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Huntsville, Alabama. It said the in-person work using postal carriers begins in June, with dozens of carriers participating as census-taker counterparts for households that do not reply to the online questionnaire.
In Spartanburg, the Census Bureau said 25 postal workers participating in the pilot will knock on doors along their routes, identify themselves as postal workers, and ask the census test questions to households that have not responded online. The bureau said the postal workers would be paid their normal U.S. Postal Service pay rate, and it cited an average hourly wage for postal carriers of $28.79 in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Census Bureau also said non-postal worker census takers in Spartanburg are being paid $17.75 an hour.
In Huntsville, the bureau said it plans to recruit 25 volunteer postal workers who will collect responses from households outside their regular mail-delivering work hours, including in the evenings or on weekends. The Census Bureau said those volunteer carriers would identify themselves as Census Bureau employees and be paid $19.75 an hour, the same rate as other census takers.
Brian Renfroe, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, said postal carriers view the task as an opportunity to help and learn. “They typically think that it’s kind of a cool thing that they’re a little bit of a guinea pig,” Renfroe said, describing how carriers may relate to residents who receive mail from them.
Renfroe also said postal carriers can rely on existing relationships and trust built through regular delivery. “Letter carriers, they know their people,” he said. “You’ve got kind of some trust already built in there.”
The Census Bureau said the idea of using postal carriers has drawn support for decades, with backers arguing it leverages an established workforce and the carriers’ familiarity with households along routes. But the Government Accountability Office said in 2011 that using mail carriers would not be cost-effective because they are paid significantly more than temporary census workers.
The Associated Press reported that U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s department oversees the Census Bureau and that the Postmaster General David Steiner said Lutnick viewed using postal carriers as cheaper than hiring temporary census takers. Steiner recalled Lutnick saying that census takers repeatedly return to the same house until they find someone at home, and that residents may be more likely to speak with a familiar mail carrier than with someone who only appears for the census.
Despite that argument, the Associated Press said a group of 21 Democratic state attorneys general raised objections earlier this month, arguing the Census Bureau had not shown that the approach would save money or increase efficiency. The attorneys general sent a letter to the Commerce Department making those points.
The Census Bureau also faced a separate set of criticisms tied to changes the Trump administration made to the 2026 census test, advocates said. The Associated Press reported that four other test locations were eliminated, the online questionnaire response options were narrowed to English instead of English, Spanish and Chinese, and the test used questions from the American Community Survey that includes a citizenship question rather than a much-shorter traditional census form.
The Associated Press said an earlier pilot to use postal workers for a 2026-like test was planned for the 2018 census test in Rhode Island but was canceled over conflicting confidentiality requirements involving the Census Bureau and the Postal Service. The Associated Press said confidentiality rules would treat a household’s address and whether it was vacant as confidential under Census Bureau provisions, while Postal Service rules allow disclosure of that information to law enforcement or other agencies.
In response to concerns about confidentiality, the Census Bureau said postal workers participating in the test will adhere to Census Bureau confidentiality provisions. It said they will undergo the same training as Census Bureau census takers and take “an oath for life” to protect respondents’ confidentiality, according to the bureau.