Updated February 5, 2026 at 1:25 PM EST
Participants in this year's may be asked about , the Trump administration revealed Thursday.
The proposal, which is for the test, comes months after President Trump 鈥� in the middle of a redistricting push for new voting maps that could help Republicans keep control of the U.S. House of Representatives 鈥� for a "new" census that would, for the first time in U.S. history, exclude millions of people living in the country without legal status.
In Congress, are backing similar controversial proposals to leave out some or all non-U.S. citizens from a set of census numbers used to determine each state's share of congressional seats and Electoral College votes.
According to the , those census apportionment counts must include the "whole number of persons in each state."
And in federal court, multiple GOP-led states have filed lawsuits seeking to force the bureau to subtract from those counts residents without legal status and those with nonimmigrant visas, such as international college students and diplomats living in the United States. Missouri's case goes further by calling for their exclusion from all census counts, including those for distributing federal dollars for public services in local communities.
Results from the 2026 test are not expected to be used to redistribute political representation. Instead, the test is designed to inform preparations for the next once-a-decade head count in 2030, which include a report on the planned question topics that is due to Congress in 2027.
The comes from an annual U.S. Census Bureau survey that is much longer than recent forms for the national tally. It's not clear why the bureau is using the American Community Survey to test methods for the census. Spokespeople for the bureau and its parent agency, the Commerce Department, did not immediately respond to NPR's requests for comment.
In addition to citizenship status, the form asks about people's sources of income, whether their home has a bathtub or shower, and whether the home is connected to a public sewer, among other questions.
The form, however, does not reflect changes to racial and ethnic categories that the Biden administration approved for the 2030 census and other federal surveys, including new checkboxes for "Middle Eastern or North African" and "Hispanic or Latino." A White House agency official said in December that the Trump administration is .
On Monday, the bureau announced , which is between April and September and involve around 155,000 households in Huntsville, Ala., and Spartanburg, S.C.
As with all surveys conducted by the bureau, bans the agency from putting out information that would identify a person to anyone, including other federal agencies and law enforcement.
Still, many census advocates are concerned the Trump administration's plan will discourage many historically undercounted populations, including households with immigrants and mixed-status families, from participating in the field test at a time of increased immigration enforcement and .
Previous that adding a citizenship question would likely undermine the count's accuracy by lowering response rates for many of the least-responsive populations.
During the first Trump administration, the U.S. Supreme Court a citizenship question from being added to the 2020 census, while on whether the president can carry out an unprecedented exclusion of people without legal status from apportionment counts.
In to the White House's Office of Management and Budget, the bureau says the form for this year's census test "will ask no questions of a sensitive nature." Whether its proposed questions move forward is now for OMB to decide.
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