Residence Rules

Usual Residence

The U.S. Bureau of the Census has traditionally used the concept of “usual residence.” This is defined as the place where the person lives and sleeps most of the time and may be different from his or her legal address or voting address. As a general principle, people should be counted (i.e. included in a survey) at their usual place of residence. Some people have no usual place of residence; these people should be counted where they are staying at the time of the survey.

This gives rise to a set of rules that can be used to address most situations. They include the following:

• People away on vacation and business should be counted at their permanent residence.
• Students
  • Boarding school students should be counted at their parental homes. (This is the major exception to the usual rule.)
  • Students living away at college should be counted where they are living at college and therefore excluded from their parental homes.
  • Students living at home while attending college are counted at home.
• Nonfamily members in the home are included if this is where they live and sleep most of the time. Included here are live-in household help, foster children, roomers, and housemates or roommates.
• Military personnel are counted where they live or sleep most of the time, which generally means that they are not included in their permanent residence households. For example, personnel serving in Iraq, while absent, are not included in the household where they resided before they left and to which they will return.
• Hospitals, prisons, and other institutions
  • Persons staying temporarily at a general hospital, including newborn babies, are included in the household population, thus at their permanent residence.
  • Persons in chronic or long-term disease hospitals, such as a tuberculosis sanitarium or a mental hospital, are counted as living at the hospital, not at their previous permanent residence.
  • People in nursing or assisted-care homes are counted as living at the institution, not in the household from which they moved.
  • Inmates of prisons and jails, at any level, are counted at the penal institution and therefore not in their previous permanent residence household.

Some of the most difficult problems arise in the situations where a given person has more than one place of residence. This can happen because the

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