Printer-friendly page

State Information > Disability Statistics > 2003 > US

US Disability Data Table From the 2003 American Community Survey

Estimates for 2003

An estimated 38,934,000 people in the United States have a disability, or 14.8% of the population age 5 and over. An estimated 7,023,000 people, or 2.7% of the population 5 and over, have difficulty performing self-care activities, also known as Activities of Daily Living, such as dressing, bathing, or getting around inside the home.

Read more about these data.

Source: Tabulations by the Center for PAS from the 2003 American Community Survey (ACS).

About the US 2003 ACS Disability Data

The Center for Personal Assistance Services has compiled state and national data on the prevalence of overall disability and of self-care difficulty, by gender, age, race and ethnicity, type of disability, family income, benefit recipiency, employment status, and living arrangement. These statistics are based on our tabulations of public use data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) for 2003, containing information on over 1 million residents of randomly selected U.S. households. Because it is a household survey, people living in institutions such as nursing homes are not included.

These statistics from the 2003 ACS are both more current and more valid than estimates obtained from either the 2000 Census or previous years of the ACS. Problems discovered in two of the six disability questions, leading to a substantial overestimate of the disability population in the 2000 Census, have been fixed in the 2003 ACS questionnaire. These problems also affected prior years of the ACS, but to a lesser extent than the 2000 Census, due to different data collection procedures.

Current & previous years of disability data from the ACS:

• US Disability Data From 2005 American Community Survey
• US Disability Data From 2004 American Community Survey
• US Disability Data From 2002 American Community Survey

Top

Choose Another State
Select from Map	OR	Select from List Entire U.S. Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming