American Time Use Survey (ATUS) Series

The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) is the Nation's first federally administered, continuous survey on time use in the United States. This multi-year data collection contains information on the amount of time (in minutes) that people spent doing various activities on a given day, including the arts activities, in the years 2003 through 2023.

Data collection for the ATUS began in January 2003. Sample cases for the survey are selected monthly, and interviews are conducted continuously throughout the year. In 2023, approximately 9,000 individuals were interviewed. Estimates are released annually. ATUS sample households are chosen from the households that completed their eighth (final) interview for the Current Population Survey (CPS), the nation's monthly household labor force survey. ATUS sample households are selected to ensure that estimates will be nationally representative. One individual age 15 or over is randomly chosen from each sampled household. This "designated person" is interviewed by telephone once about his or her activities on the day before the interview--the "diary day."

The ATUS Activity Coding Lexicon is a 3-tiered classification system with 17 first-tier categories. Each of the first-tier categories has two additional levels of detail. Respondents' reported activities are assigned 6-digit activity codes based on this classification system.

Additionally, the study provides demographic information--including sex, age, ethnicity, race, education, employment, and children in the household.

IMPORTANT: The 2020 ATUS was greatly affected by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Data collection was suspended in 2020 from mid-March to mid-May. ATUS data files for 2020 contain all ATUS data collected in 2020--both before and after data collection was suspended. For more information, please visit BLS's ATUS page.

The weighting method was changed for 2020 to account for the suspension of data collection in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Respondents from 2020 will have missing values for the replicate weights on this data file. The Pandemic Replicate weights file for 2019-20 contains 160 replicate final weights for each ATUS final weight created using the 2020 weighting method. Chapter 7 of the ATUS User's Guide provides more information about the 2020 weighting method.

The annual American Time Use Survey (ATUS) collects information on people in the United States and what activities they spend their time in during a 24 hour period. Questions are not only asked about what activities are engaged in, but also with who is with them at that time, for how long do they spend doing the activity, and where the activity takes place.

The current study contains the observed paradata derived from the original Blaise audit trails of the full 2010 ATUS public-use data. The dataset contains data describing the interaction by interviewers with the CATI instrument while entering responses provided by respondents. The file contains 18 variables and 2,061,889 cases.