Where Insights data comes from and how often it refreshes

Before you start

• Insights is public reference data plus Incenti's own datasets. It is not your account's data, and nobody on your account can edit it.
• Different geography levels are built from different sources, because not every publisher releases figures at every grain. A metric that exists at State level may not exist at County level, and vice versa.
• Insights does not display a "last refreshed" date anywhere in the product. The one exception is the City detail panel's More indicators section, which shows a source and period per row. This page is where the cadence for everything else is recorded.

State metrics

Twenty-six metrics are required for a state to be served at all — if any one is missing, the whole state is left off the map, table, and comparisons rather than shown with a hole in it.

Regulatory Burden covers 48 states from QuantGov; Arkansas and West Virginia keep a hand-entered CATO rank instead.

Metro metrics

Eighteen metrics must be present for a metro to be served, plus four inherited from the metro's state and two that only exist for 34 large metros.

Two of these are measured for the whole state and applied to every metro in it — Elec Rate and Violent Crime Rate — because no publisher releases them at metro grain. See County and metro data quality.

County metrics

Twenty-four metrics appear in the County catalogue. Twenty of them can be replaced by live source values county by county; the four regulatory fields always follow the county's state.

City metrics

City level is built from a single family of sources. Fourteen indicators are measured for the place itself, all from the Census American Community Survey 5-Year estimates (with the 2020 Decennial count as the population anchor): Population, Pop. Growth (5yr), Median Age, Poverty Rate, Median HH Income, Per Capita Income, Median Home Value, Median Rent, Home/Income Ratio, Median Wage, Labor Force Part., Bachelor's+, Avg Commute, and Broadband Access. These refresh annually when the ACS 5-Year release lands.

Everything under More indicators is either a city-grain upgrade from a separate source (BLS LAUS unemployment, Zillow home value and asking rent, FBI municipal crime) or a county figure inherited by the place. See City-level data for the full list and for what the County pill means.

Reference fields that never refresh

Six State metrics have no machine-readable publisher, so they are transcribed by hand and stay frozen until someone updates them:

• HS Graduation Rate
• Tax Climate Rank
• Workers' Comp Rate
• Economic Freedom Score
• Right-to-Work State
• Freight Volume Index

These values carry the publication year of the reference they were taken from, not the month of the last ingestion run. Two fields that used to be on this list — Health Premium (Annual) and Regulatory Burden Rank — now come from live sources, with the transcribed values kept only as a fallback.

Because these four also flow through to Metro (as Regulatory (State)) and County, a frozen state field is frozen at every level.

What happens when a source is unavailable

Each metric is resolved through the same three-step chain on every ingestion run:

1. Live — this run fetched a fresh value from the source.
2. Reference — no fresh value, so the hand-entered reference value is used.
3. Carryover — neither of the above, so the previous run's value keeps serving.

A carried-over value looks exactly like a fresh one in the product; nothing in the interface marks it. If every tier fails for a required metric, the consequence depends on the level:

• State and Metro — the location is dropped entirely. A state or metro is either complete or absent; it is never shown with a gap.
• County — the county still appears and the uncovered field falls back to a modelled value.
• City — the cell shows —. A withheld city value is never replaced by its county's number.

The refresh calendar

Metric ingestion runs monthly, one level per day, at 06:00 UTC:

A monthly run does not mean every number changes monthly. It means each source is asked for its latest release on that date; an annual source simply returns the same figure until it publishes again.

Three datasets are not on a schedule at all and update only when a new extract is loaded:

• EDD regions — the coded economic development district priorities.
• Incenti Subsidy Intelligence — the incentive award dataset behind Incentives. Extracts have historically arrived a few times a year, and an automated check flags the dataset internally once it is more than 90 days old.
• The verified program catalogue — re-checked weekly, with each program carrying its own Verified month.

Common questions

Q: Where does a specific number come from, and what year is it? A: The tables above name the publisher and the refresh cadence for every metric at each level. The product itself only prints a source and period on the City panel's More indicators rows and in the expanded row of the Metro table; for everything else this page is the reference.

Q: When was the data last updated? Is there a page in the product that shows the last refresh date? A: No — there is no "last refreshed" display in Insights. Metric ingestion runs monthly on the calendar above (states on the 2nd, metros the 3rd, counties the 4th, cities the 5th), and each source contributes its newest published release on that date.

Q: Do the EDD priorities and the incentive award data refresh monthly too? A: No. Both are loaded from extracts rather than run on a schedule. Incentive award extracts typically arrive a few times a year; EDD region coding is refreshed when a new dataset is published. The verified program catalogue is the exception — it is re-checked weekly.

Q: Why does my state's Tax Climate Rank never change? A: Tax Climate Rank is one of six state fields with no machine-readable publisher, so it is transcribed by hand and carries the publication year of the source it came from. It changes when the underlying index is re-published and the reference value is updated, not on the monthly cycle.

Q: A number looks out of date even though the monthly run happened. What does that mean? A: Most sources publish annually or semiannually, so a monthly run usually re-fetches the same figure. If a source is briefly unreachable, the previous value keeps serving rather than the metric disappearing — the product does not flag that, so treat the cadence column above as the real update rhythm.

Q: Can I get the raw data or an API? A: Not directly. You can download your current selection as a CSV from Explore at any level — see Export and CSV formats — or generate a report. There is no customer-facing Insights API.

Related

• Insights overview and data coverage
• How Insights scores are calculated
• County and metro data quality
• City-level data
• Export and CSV formats