Nearly 50,000 Tennessee Households Have No Air Conditioning, New Census Data Shows

As a heat wave pushed "feels like" temperatures above 110 degrees in parts of Tennessee last week, the National Weather Service gave the standard advice: stay indoors, hydrate, and run the air conditioning, because fans alone may not be enough. For an estimated 49,722 Tennessee households, that last instruction is not an option. New experimental data from the U.S. Census Bureau, released in May 2026, estimates that about 2 percent of the state's households have no access to any kind of air conditioning.

The estimate carries a margin of error of roughly 481 households, and as one Tennessee family shows, even a number that specific can understate the problem.

What the data misses

Christina Joann Rainey, a 31-year-old single mother in Carroll County, told the Tennessee Lookout that the temperature inside her home hit 82 degrees on a recent afternoon. The 16-year-old air conditioning system in the house she inherited from her grandparents has been repaired more than once and is now beyond saving, and she cannot afford the roughly $7,500 it would take to replace it. She called every agency she could think of and mostly found loan programs she worried would leave her worse off. She and her 15-year-old daughter cooled down by sitting in the car or driving to a Dollar General for lemonade, while she worried about leaving her aging pets in the heat. A local technician eventually loaned her a window unit for free.

Rainey's case points to the limits of the Census figure. The data was collected before her system failed, so a household like hers, which had working air conditioning when the survey was taken but does not now, may still be counted as having it. The estimate also says nothing about people who own a unit but ration it, or go without, because they cannot afford the electricity to run it. Rainey said her mother, in nearby Milan, had been avoiding her window units for exactly that reason until the heat left her no choice.

How the Census Bureau built the estimate

The numbers come from a new experimental product called the Local Air Conditioning Estimates, which the Census Bureau published in response to requests for better local measures of heat vulnerability. Air conditioning is not something the American Community Survey directly asks about. The American Housing Survey does ask, but it is not designed to produce numbers for small areas. So the Bureau combined the two surveys, using data from 2019 through 2023 and a machine-learning model, to estimate whether a given household likely lacks a unit.

The result is a dataset that reaches down to the national, state, county, and census-tract levels, which is the point. It lets planners and emergency managers see which specific communities are most exposed when a heat wave hits, and it is meant to work alongside the Bureau's Community Resilience Estimates for Heat. Air conditioning is close to universal in the United States: nationally, more than nine in ten households have it. That is exactly what makes the gaps matter, because the households without it are concentrated, and a 110-degree heat index does not spread its risk evenly.

Where people can turn

Help for people without air conditioning is patchy and local. As temperatures sat in the 90s, the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency's shelter map showed nine cooling centers open across the state, most of them in Middle Tennessee, and the Hospitality Hub of Memphis opened its own cooling center for a two-hour window. In Davidson County, the Metro Action Commission's Summer Cooling program hands out free fans and window units to eligible elderly residents, families with children under 6, and disabled residents from May through August. The Tennessee Valley Authority's Home Uplift program helps income-qualified households replace aging systems and seal up their homes, though when Rainey checked, she was told TVA was not accepting applications in her area. The state Department of Health pointed residents to county governments and local emergency management agencies.

The Local Air Conditioning Estimates are one more example of the Census Bureau turning its surveys toward a specific, timely question. You can look up the population and housing profile of Tennessee or any county on CensusEasy, and read what the census is and how its data gets used in our explainer on the purpose of a census, or compare any two places with the compare tool.

Sources

Reporting and the Rainey family's account are from the Tennessee Lookout (July 7, 2026). The dataset is the U.S. Census Bureau's Local Air Conditioning Estimates, described in its June 2026 report and release announcement, built on the American Housing Survey and the American Community Survey.