A census tract is, in the practice of the United States as a county and government, a geographic region recognized in the course of carrying out a census and accordingly used for directing the process of the survey.

Census tract maps are thus provided to employees of the service with authority over this function, as in the United States is represented by the particular source of the U.S. Census Bureau. Moreover, a Census tract will accordingly be used for this purpose by representatives of the U.S. government according to a timeline of every 10 years. Outside of the United States, the territories referred to by that country’s Census Bureau as a Census tract will instead be called a census area or census district.

Census tract maps pertaining to the U.S. will show that census tract lines commonly coincide with those of other local divisions of land, such as into towns, cities, or other kinds of local political entities, and in that in all, in terms of the size of a census tract, census tract maps for one whole county will generally indicate several such political territories

Further in regard to the place of the Census tract and census tract maps in U.S. political practice, it might be noted that the census tract concept is generally considered to have originated as an American concept. Census tract divisions first began to be used in 1906 as methods for measuring statistical variations in local New York City neighborhoods, and were thus used in the census carried out four years later.