On September 16, 2015 the Census Bureau will release data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and American Community Survey (ACS), providing updated income, poverty, and health insurance coverage rates for 2014. These reports should give the best picture of the effects of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) major coverage expansions on the uninsured rate.

As Matt Broaddus and Edwin Park of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities note, preliminary reports indicate the number of uninsured fell by nearly 9 million in 2014. They offer a great rundown of how other surveys—such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the Urban Institute’s Health Reform Monitoring Survey (HRMS)—already provide insight into what we can expect from the Census Bureau later this week.

What are the ACS and CPS exactly?

It would be easiest to say the CPS and ACS are the most authoritative sources of health insurance coverage information at the national and state levels, respectively. But if you’d like to know more about what they are, how the surveys are conducted, and how they differ from one another, last year on Say Ahhh!, Alisa Chester provided exactly that information in an overview of the ACS and CPS.

But if you already knew that (and especially if you’re reading this), you’d be right if you suspected that CCF has already been thinking about how this new, post-ACA data would lead to major updates in our annual 50-state report on uninsured children and our report with the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) on uninsured Hispanic children. As soon as the data is released, our resident number cruncher Alisa Chester will be holed up in her office so she can provide you with one-year trends of what these findings mean for children and families in states across the nation.