Can I Use Census Reporter for historical data comparison?
You can also find data for many years worth of Census products via data.census.gov, although these do not address the potential complexity of comparing across changes in geography, question details, or other changes in Census programs from year to year.
For some cases, you can use the "Comparison Profile" data products, which, for selected estimates, provide values from previous ACS releases, as well as an indicator of whether the differences are statistically significant when taking margin of error into account. For example, here is CP02 Comparative Social Characteristics in the United States for the United States
Here's a little more from our "Table Codes" topical help page
CP: Comparison Profiles
The comparison profile (CP) tables provide a lot of popular statistics across subjects in a single table. Additionally, they provide data for those statistics across several years. Values are provided only as percentages, and the tables include flags which indicate whether the change for any value between years is statistically significant.
The links below go to the given comparison profile for the entire United States (or Puerto Rico, for CP02PR), but comparison profiles are also available for all states (including DC and Puerto Rico), all metropolitan areas, all congressional districts, and counties and places with a minimum population of 65,000 for the 1-year ACS and of 5,000 for the 5-year ACS.
CP02: Comparative Social Characteristics in the USCP02PR: Comparative Social Characteristics in Puerto RicoCP03: Comparative Economic CharacteristicsCP04: Comparative Housing CharacteristicsCP05: Comparative Demographic Characteristics