A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. The term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses include agriculture, business, and traffic censuses. The United Nations defines the essential features of population and housing censuses as "individual enumeration, universality within a defined territory, simultaneity and defined periodicity", and recommends that population censuses be taken at least every 10 years. United Nations recommendations also cover census topics to be collected, official definitions, classifications and other useful information to coordinate international practice.

The word is of Latin origin; during the Roman Republic, the census was a list that kept track of all adult males fit for military service. The modern census is essential to international comparisons of any kind of statistics and censuses collect data on many attributes of the population, not just how many people there are, although population estimates remain an important function of the census.

The census can be contrasted with sampling in which information is obtained only from a subset of a population, sometimes as an intercensal estimate. Census data are commonly used for research, business marketing, and planning, as well as a baseline for sampling surveys. Census counts are necessary to adjust samples to be representative of a population by weighting them as is common in opinion polling. Similarly, stratification requires knowledge of the relative sizes of different population strata which are derived from census enumerations. In some countries, census data are used to apportion electoral representation (sometimes controversially – e.g., Utah v. Evans).