What does "(in 2023 inflation-adjusted dollars)" mean?

Most folks are familiar with the US Census Bureau's Decennial Census (2010 & 2020) that sends a survey out to all (ideally!) US households. But what's not as well known is that the US Census Bureau also collects data each year from a much smaller sample of US households. This annual data is used to produce a dataset called the American Community Survey.

Now because the sample size of the American Community Survey is small, the Census Bureau can only produce annual demographic estimates for large geographies like New York City or Harris County, Texas. For small geographies like zip codes/ZCTAs, they have to sum the survey data that's collected in multiple years to produce estimates with reasonable margins of error. 

The most current data available from the US Census Bureau for geographies (such as counties, cities, and zips/ZCTAs) is from a dataset called the 2019-2023 American Community Survey. The US Census Bureau has taken American Community Survey data collected in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 and uses this data to produce demographic estimates for zip codes/ZCTAs for 2023.  When the Census Bureau collects income data in 2019, and then they use the 2019 data to estimate the 2023 income, they need to adjust the income reported in 2019 to 2023 dollars to account for inflation.