A housing unit is classified as occupied if it is the current place of residence of the person or group of people living in it at the time of interview, or if the occupants are only temporarily absent from the residence for two months or less, that is, away on vacation or a business trip. If all the people staying in the unit at the time of the interview are staying there for two months or less, the unit is considered to be temporarily occupied and classified as "vacant." The occupants may be a single family, one person living alone, two or more families living together, or any other group of related or unrelated people who share living quarters. The living quarters occupied by staff personnel within any group quarters are separate housing units if they satisfy the housing unit criteria of separateness and direct access; otherwise, they are considered group quarters.

Occupied rooms or suites of rooms in hotels, motels, and similar places are classified as housing units only when occupied by permanent residents, that is, people who consider the hotel as their current place of residence or have no current place of residence elsewhere. If any of the occupants in rooming or boarding houses, congregate housing, or continuing care facilities live separately from others in the building and have direct access, their quarters are classified as separate housing units.

The data on bedrooms were obtained from Housing Question 7b in the 2013 American Community Survey. The question was asked at both occupied and vacant housing units. The number of bedrooms is the count of rooms designed to be used as bedrooms, that is, the number of rooms that would be listed as bedrooms if the house, apartment, or mobile home were on the market for sale or for rent. Included are all rooms intended to be used as bedrooms even if they currently are being used for some other purpose. A housing unit consisting of only one room is classified, by definition, as having no bedroom.

Bedrooms provide the basis for estimating the amount of living and sleeping spaces within a housing unit. These data allow officials to evaluate the adequacy of the housing stock to shelter the population, and to determine any housing deficiencies in neighborhoods. The data also allow officials to track the changing physical characteristics of the housing inventory over time.

Question/Concept History - The 1996-1998 American Community Survey question provided a response category for "None" and space for the respondent to enter a number of bedrooms. From 1999-2007, the question provided pre-coded response categories from "No bedroom" to "5 or more bedrooms." Starting in 2008, the question became the second part of a two-part question that linked the number of "rooms" and number of "bedrooms" questions together. In addition, the wording of the question was changed to ask, "How many of these rooms are bedrooms?" Additional changes introduced in 2008 included removing the pre- coded response categories and adding a write-in box for the respondent to enter the number of bedrooms, providing the rule to use for defining a "bedroom" as an instruction, and providing an additional instruction addressing efficiency and studio apartments - "If this is an efficiency/studio apartment, print '0'."

Limitation of the Data - The Census Bureau tested the changes introduced to the 2008 version of the bedrooms question in the 2006 ACS Content Test. The results of this testing show that the changes may introduce an inconsistency in the data produced for this question as observed from the years 2007 to 2008, see "2006 ACS Content Test Evaluation Report Covering Rooms and Bedrooms" on the ACS website (http://www.census.gov/acs).

Comparability - Caution should be used when comparing American Community Survey data on bedrooms from the years 2008 and after with both pre-2008 ACS and Census 2000 data. Changes made to the bedrooms question between the 2007 and 2008 ACS involving the wording as well as the response option resulted in an inconsistency in the ACS data. This inconsistency in the data was most noticeable as an increase in "No bedroom" responses and as a decrease in "1 bedroom" to "3 bedrooms" responses.