Mail carriers are collecting census answers, and two cities are testing two different rules

For the first time, the federal government is having mail carriers knock on doors and collect census answers. It's happening right now in two metro areas, Spartanburg County, South Carolina and Huntsville, Alabama, and residents there are legally required to respond by August 31.

The experiment is drawing objections from people who follow census law closely, because postal workers and census takers operate under two different confidentiality statutes that don't say the same thing. Title 13 bars the Census Bureau from sharing your answers with anyone, including law enforcement, with no exceptions. Title 39, which governs the Postal Service, permits sharing information with other agencies in certain circumstances.

What most coverage has missed is that the Bureau isn't testing one approach here. It's testing two, and the difference between the cities is precisely the thing critics are worried about.

Two cities, two different experiments

The 2026 Census Test covers about 73,600 households in Spartanburg and 81,000 in Huntsville. The postal workers are doing different jobs in each place.

In Spartanburg, a letter carrier may collect census responses while running a regular route, so the mail job and the enumerator job happen in the same shift, in the same uniform, at the same doors. In Huntsville, postal employees doing census work are hired as Census Bureau employees and work outside their postal duties, which keeps the two roles separate.

That distinction matters because it's the exact question at issue. When a reporter from WSPA asked Dominic Beamer, an assistant division chief in the Bureau's Decennial Census Management Division, whether the two roles could really be kept separate when one person does both, the interview was paused, and a Census public relations staffer said "I don't know how specific we feel comfortable getting on that." The answer, judging by the test design, is that the Bureau doesn't know either. That's what the two sites are for.

Why the legal question isn't new

This has been tried before and abandoned. A similar pilot was scrapped during the 2018 census test, and the Bureau's own 2020 Census testing report concluded the pilot "could not be implemented because of irreconcilable differences." The differences in question were between those two statutes.

The issue resurfaced in June, when senators questioned Postmaster General David Steiner about it. Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey cited both the conflicting laws and the earlier finding. "We've gone through this several years ago and as mentioned they were discontinued based off irreconcilable differences between these two," Kim said. Steiner replied that the Postal Service's legal department and Commerce Department lawyers "looked at those issues, resolved those issues."

The Bureau's position is that the protections travel with the task. Beamer said postal workers are "subject to the exact same Title 13, Title 26 provisions in Federal law as every other Census taker is," and the Bureau's written statement draws the line by activity: when postal workers deliver mail they're doing Postal Service work, and when they ask census questions on a Bureau-issued device they're working as enumerators. Every postal worker in the pilot takes an oath of nondisclosure, passes a background check, and receives census-specific training.

Not everyone is convinced. Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former staff director of the House subcommittee that oversees the census, told WSPA she hasn't seen proof the arrangement is airtight. "I haven't seen any evidence yet that the Census Bureau or the administration have made it air tight," Lowenthal said.

If you live in one of these areas

Responding is mandatory under federal law, and the deadline is August 31. There are two ways to do it: online, or in person with whoever comes to the door. Households that respond online don't get a visit, which is why some residents have filled out the form specifically to avoid handing their information to a letter carrier.

Any census worker, postal or not, must carry a badge with a name and photo. A legitimate census worker will never ask for your Social Security number, your mother's maiden name, credit card information, or your political party. Visits can run as late as 9 p.m., including weekends. For what the law actually requires of you, see what happens if you don't fill out the census.

Why these two metros: the Bureau wanted places with a workable mix of urban and rural geography, historically low response rates, and housing that's hard to find or hidden. Spartanburg County fits, with 347,852 residents spread at about 430 people per square mile, well short of city density and well above empty countryside.

The stakes reach past 2026. Whatever these two cities produce will shape how the 2030 count reaches the households that don't answer the first time, which is the expensive, decisive part of any census. It lands alongside a stack of other unsettled 2030 decisions, from a draft rule that would change who gets counted to a privacy overhaul that changes what gets published.

Sources

Test locations, household counts, the differing postal approaches in each city, the August 31 deadline, and the confidentiality and training requirements are from the U.S. Census Bureau's announcement that census takers began visiting households and its 2026 Census Test program page. Quotes from Dominic Beamer, Terri Ann Lowenthal, Senator Andy Kim, Postmaster General David Steiner, the Census Bureau's written statement, and the 2018 pilot finding come from WSPA 7NEWS reporting. Spartanburg County demographic figures are CensusEasy calculations from the American Community Survey.