To ensure the greatest benefit to users from the outset, the initial release focuses on the information people search for most often — names, surnames, streets, townlands and other key identifying details.
Ongoing refinement and future releases
The 1926 Census is one of the largest archival projects ever undertaken by the National Archives. Almost three million individual entries have been digitised, each containing more than a dozen pieces of information taken from the household forms and enumerators’ abstracts. This amounts to around 45 million separate data points. Over the past three years, staff have worked intensively to catalogue, digitise and transcribe this material in preparation for the official release on 18 April 2026.
Work to check, refine and complete the remaining data is ongoing. Updated and corrected information will be released in phases over the coming year. These future releases will include a dashboard and tools that allow users to explore and analyse the census across all fields, offering new insights into life in Ireland in the early twentieth century.
A later phase will add the ability to search free‑text fields such as occupation and employer. These fields were written in the respondents’ own words and require careful manual transcription by National Archives staff. This work is progressing as part of the wider cleaning and enhancement of the dataset.
Data quality
Checking of the data is ongoing and regular updates will be made. This may include corrections to names, age, religion, birthplace and relationship to head and head of household, as well as inclusion of further information from free text fields such as occupation and employer in a searchable format. In the meantime, it is possible to search by location using the map.
Data issues are particularly apparent in Donegal. A full quality check of this county is underway and the website will be updated as soon as this work is completed.
Missing transcription
In a small number of instances, errors in transcription output have been identified including approximately 3,000 missing individuals. This may include individuals missing from a particular household or from an entire townland. No entire District Electoral Division is missing. These errors account for around 0.1% of the total number of people enumerated in the census. They are mainly located in Dublin, Limerick, Wexford and Kilkenny. Work is ongoing to manually transcribe these missing individuals, and they will be searchable in the next website update. In the majority of these cases, the household returns have been digitised and can be sent to researchers as PDFs until the website is updated.
Information appearing in the incorrect townland
In a very small number of cases, individual households have been incorrectly linked to the wrong townland. These errors will be fixed in the initial website updates after launch.
Irish language forms
Irish language returns have been manually transcribed by National Archives staff. Initial focus was placed on names and surnames to make the individuals searchable on the website. Work is ongoing to transcribe remaining fields and updates will be made over the coming weeks and months. In a very small number of cases, Irish language returns were incorrectly identified as English forms. Transcription of these forms will be included as part of this process.
How updates will be managed
The National Archives will continue to refine and enhance the 1926 Census dataset over the coming year. Updates that require checking or manual transcription will be added in planned phases, ensuring that improvements are applied consistently across the entire collection. To keep this work moving as efficiently as possible, we are not able to respond to individual correction requests. Instead, all updates will be incorporated through this structured process, allowing staff to focus on completing the remaining transcription and quality‑checking work for the benefit of all users.
All census forms are now digitised and searchable by name or place, and the website offers a wealth of material to help you explore the 1926 Census and its historical context.