NCES EDGE School District Geographic Relationship Files, 2025
Official relationship files linking school districts to census tracts, places, counties and metro areas, used to place districts on the map.
NCES describes these files as providing "a complete set of geographic associations between school districts and other types of geographic areas," built to answer questions such as which ZIP codes fall inside a district or what portion of a district lies within a metropolitan area. Each row pairs a school district with one other geographic unit and records the land and water area they share.
Coverage#
The 2025 release covers 13,349 school districts, on geography from the Census Bureau's 2025 TIGER files, with districts as they stood in the 2024-25 school year. Metropolitan area codes follow the OMB July 2023 delineations.
The relationships used here are district-to-tract (127,274 pairs), district-to-place (55,276), district-to-county (19,298) and district-to-metro area (16,606). The published package also includes block group, congressional district, county subdivision, urban area and ZIP code tabulation area relationships, which we hold but do not load.
How we use it#
School measures are reported for a district, but Birdseye displays results for census tracts. These files are the official statement of which districts overlap which tracts, places, counties and metro areas, and they are what allows a district's figures to be attributed to the geography it serves. They produce no metric of their own.
Considerations#
District boundaries and tract boundaries do not coincide, and a tract can fall inside more than one district. 214 district identifiers present in the 2025 relationship files are absent from the current district directory, chiefly because the two releases describe slightly different moments.
Citation#
Geverdt, D. and Maselli, A. (2024). Education Demographic and Geographic Estimates Program (EDGE): School District Geographic Relationship Files Technical Documentation. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC.
Geverdt, D. and Maselli, A. (2024). Education Demographic and Geographic Estimates Program (EDGE): School District Geographic Relationship Files Technical Documentation. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/edge/Geographic/RelationshipFiles.
NCES states that information in the technical documentation is in the public domain unless specifically noted, and that mention of commercial products or organizations does not imply U.S. Government endorsement.
References#
- 1NCES Education Demographic and Geographic Estimates programhttps://nces.ed.gov/programs/edge/geographic/relationshipfiles