Referenced by 12 other explainers
A marker is a quantity or breakdown you look at for an area. Many markers are socio-economic breakdowns built from Census data, and split the people, families, or homes in an area into groups. For example, household type splits homes into six groups. Ancestry splits people by the background they report. Markers are grouped into themes, such as Families and Cultural Diversity. Each marker has its own page with charts, tables, and an explainer. The figures are Place Forecast estimates, read best as patterns.
Some markers do more than give context: they are also used to calculate the forecast. Those markers are called components, such as births, deaths, and population. A marker that does not feed the forecast is there for context only. See the marker methodology for how the Census-based markers are made.