Download and use Census TIGER/Line shapefiles in R

tigris is an R package that allows users to directly download and use TIGER/Line shapefiles (https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-line.html) from the US Census Bureau.

Want to learn how to use tigris? Take the DataCamp course Analyzing US Census Data in R!

To install the package from CRAN, issue the following command in R:

install.packages('tigris')

Or, get the development version from GitHub:

devtools::install_github('walkerke/tigris')

In version 0.6:

• You are now able to specify a custom cache directory for your data. To set the cache directory, use the new tigris_cache_dir() function:

library(tigris)
tigris_cache_dir("PATH TO YOUR CUSTOM CACHE DIRECTORY")
# Restart R
options(tigris_use_cache = TRUE)

• tigris now defaults to the 2016 TIGER/Line and cartographic boundary shapefiles.

• Thanks to contributors from Transport Foundry (https://github.com/transportfoundry), tigris now includes some geolocator functions. For example, to find out the Census block ID of a given address:

call_geolocator("2850 S University Dr", "Fort Worth", "TX")

Address (2850 S University Dr Fort Worth TX) returned more than one address match. The first match was returned.
[1] "484391042014000"

• Stay tuned for batch geocoding support in a future release!

To learn how to use the package, I'd recommend the following materials:

• My article in The R Journal, "tigris: An R Package to Access and Work with Geographic Data from the US Census Bureau"
• A webinar I gave with Ari Lamstein on tigris in April 2017

Available datasets:

Please note: cartographic boundary files in tigris are not available for 2011 and 2012.