U.S. Census Bureau TIGER Files

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U.S Census Bureau produces the TIGER files, which contain extracts of selected geographic and cartographic information from the Census Bureau's TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) database, including boundaries of census blocks and tracts, roads, and other information.

The TIGER files are distributed by the Census Bureau in a format that cannot be used directly by common GIS software, it must be converted first. ESRI has done this conversion and placed the files for free download on their web site. But those files require some further processing: specifically, the coordinates are in decimal degrees, but most NJ GIS users require NJ State Plane Feet. We have done that conversion and placed the files here for download.

Note: Different versions of TIGER files are released by the Census Bureau at different times. The files here are the ones known as the redistricting TIGER files, which do not include some corrections that were subsequently made. See the TIGER web site for further info.

If you are interested in the whole state, the New Jersey DEP Bureau of GIS has tracts, blocks, and block groups for the entire state in single shapefiles on their data download page.

To download a shapefile, select from the list below. Each shapefile is stored here in a zip format; you will need zip software to extract them. For more information about zip software, see our tools page.