ACTS Update: Blank Values Now Permitted for Sex Variable

On February 17, 2026, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) issued an update to the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS) collection affecting how institutions report the sex variable in record-level data.  

According to the official notice, institutions may now leave the “sex” field blank, when necessary, rather than being required to assign a value of male or female. This change applies to all academic years currently being collected in ACTS and is intended to simplify reporting.   

Updated templates (version 1.2) and the associated change logs are available on the RTI ACTS website.  Importantly: 

• This update applies only to ACTS and does not affect any other IPEDS components. 

• Institutions that have already submitted ACTS files are not required to re-submit. However, revised files may be re-submitted if desired. 

If an institution chooses to re-submit: 

1. Re-process the revised record-level data using the ACTS Aggregator tool. 

2. Upload the newly generated aggregate files to the Data Collection System (DCS). 

3. The newly uploaded files will automatically overwrite previous submissions. 

The full notice, titled “This Week in IPEDS: ACTS Update Affecting the Reporting of Sex Data,” was released by the IPEDS Help Desk on February 17, 2026. 

AIR has been advocating for this change since fall 2025, noting that the absence of an “unknown” or “missing” category for sex created significant data-quality and reporting concerns for institutions.