Where can I get county-level estimates from NSDUH?

NSDUH data for counties with a population of 100,000 or greater are available through the Research Data Center (RDC). However, because of our geographic sampling methods, some counties may not have data in a particular year. Data for some larger counties is also available in several more easily accessible forms.

A few basic estimates for some large counties are available from the NSDUH substate reports. These are based on models of data concatenated over three years. Smaller counties are clustered to produce substate regional estimates.

These data are also available in an interactive data tool, which can be used both to visualize and download the information by year and substate region.

The  Data Analysis System (DAS) allows users to analyze restricted NSDUH datasets, concatenated over multiple years, to use some geographic identifiers for simple crosstabulations. While state-level information is available from the 2-year NSDUH DAS files, only the 10-year files include substate-level indicators. The table below lists some geographic variables available in DAS.

NSDUH does not include geographic indicators like county or state in public-use datasets. Full restricted single-year NSDUH data files are available only through the RDC. If you need this detailed geographic data, you can apply for access to restricted-use NSDUH data through the interagency Standard Application Process (SAP) portal.