Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component Overview

Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component Overview

Household Component

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Summary Data Tables

Expenditures per Person by Health Care Service Expenditures per Event by Health Care Service Type Expenditures by Medical Condition Health Insurance Quality of Care Access to Care Top Prescribed Drugs State-Level Medical Expenditures

The MEPS Household Component fields questionnaires to individual household members to collect nationally representative data on demographic characteristics, health conditions, health status, use of medical care services, charges and payments, access to care, satisfaction with care, health insurance coverage, income, and employment.

Survey basics: Select from the following for detailed information on the objectives, instruments, and procedures for data collection in the Household Component:

• Survey questionnaires
• Glossary of terms used in survey questionnaires
• Panel Design and Data Collection Process 
• Sample sizes 
• Response rates 
• MEPS Sample Persons In-Scope for Part of the Year 
• Standard Errors for MEPS Estimates 
• Price Indices for Expenditure and Income Comparisons 
• Household Annual Contractor Methodology Report
• Respondent Payment Experiment – Results from Panel 13
• Cancer SAQ Pretest Reports for 2011 Survey Year
• Methodology Reports
• FAQs about the Household Component
• Analyzing MEPS Household Component Medical Condition Data (PDF, 158 KB) or HTM format

MEPS Household Component data are available online and at the AHRQ Data Center or one of the Census Bureau's Research Data Centers.

Online data can be found through

• MEPS topics: Resources on this site for particular topics of interest. 
• Publications: Analyses of MEPS data ranging from brief to extensive reports, chartbooks consisting mainly of graphs, and descriptions of MEPS sample designs and survey methods.
• Summary data tables: Tables with frequently used summary data on household medical utilization and expenditures. 
• MEPSnet query tools: Interactive query tools that generate statistics using Household Component public use data files. 
• Downloadable data files (person, job, event, or condition level): Public use data files, documentation, and codebooks. 
• Projected expenditures: Projected expenditure data files (NHEA-Aligned MEPS) and tabular results, based on the final population projections from the Census Bureau for years 2002-2016. Note, this data release replaces the old 1996-2008 projections and the interim data are no longer available.

Restricted data files: Researchers with approved projects can access data files not available for public use at the AHRQ Data Center, located at AHRQ headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, or at one of the Census Bureau's Research Data Centers.