The Census Bureau Is Lining Up a $1 Billion Contract to Build the 2030 Count

The 2030 census is more than four years away, but the contracts that will build it are being written now. The Census Bureau has scheduled an industry day for July 21 to walk potential vendors through its plan for a small-business contract vehicle that could be worth up to $1 billion over as long as 10 years, most of it aimed at the software and data systems behind the next count.

The event is a response to demand. The Bureau released draft solicitation documents in April and, according to Washington Technology, got back a large volume of questions. The industry day is meant to answer them before the Bureau releases a full solicitation, which it is targeting for August.

How the work is split up

Rather than one giant award, the Bureau is structuring the work as a set of blanket purchase agreements, the government's mechanism for pre-approving a pool of vendors to take on task orders over time. There are four, and they divide the job by function.

The enterprise agreement is the broad one, covering application development, data science, and data management across all of the Bureau's operations. A pair of single-award agreements handle the decennial program itself and the geospatial work that maps every address in the country. The fourth, another multiple-award vehicle, splits into three task areas: program management, IT program and project management, and architecture and engineering.

The industry day will be virtual, with no live question-and-answer session. The Bureau plans to post the event materials to Sam.gov, the federal government's contracting portal, afterward, and registration details are available through the Washington Technology report.

Why the plumbing matters

2020 was the first census most Americans could answer online, and about two-thirds of households did. The systems that made that possible, and the ones that will run 2030, are exactly the kind of behind-the-scenes technology that determines whether a census goes smoothly or stumbles. Federal auditors have repeatedly warned that the Bureau's IT modernization is running behind schedule, so the decisions being made in these contracting documents now are the ones that show up, invisibly, on everyone's screen in April 2030.

For the bigger picture on what the census does and why an accurate one matters, see our explainers on the purpose of a census and why it runs every 10 years, or explore the current national numbers at a glance.

Sources

Reporting is from Washington Technology (July 2026). Contracting materials are posted by the U.S. Census Bureau on the federal Sam.gov portal.