Household Survey Format & Questionnaire (Free Template + Sample Questions)

About Anaxee

40,000+ Digital Runners · 540 districts · 26 states · 11,000+ pincodes of reach

★ Winner, National Startup Award (Govt. of India)Trusted by 350+ brandsIndia’s Reach Engine since 2016

A household survey lives or dies on two things: reaching the door, and asking the right questions the right way once you are there. This page is about the second — the format. Get the questionnaire structure right and your data is clean, comparable and usable; get it wrong and no amount of fieldwork saves it.

Below is the exact household survey format Anaxee uses in the field — the one we run for household-solar, CSR, welfare and socio-economic programmes across India. Copy it, adapt it, and when you want it configured as a live mobile form or run across hundreds of districts, that is what we do. For the full picture of how a survey is planned and executed, see our complete guide to household surveys in India.

The household survey questionnaire format

This is a modular format: keep the common core (Sections 1–6 and 8) fixed across every project so your data stays comparable, and swap only Section 7 — the programme module — to fit solar, health, agriculture or WASH.

Section by section: what to capture and why

A questionnaire is not just a list of questions — each section earns its place. Here is the reasoning behind the format above, so you can adapt it without breaking it.

1–2. Identification & location

This is what makes a record traceable. A survey ID, GPS, timestamp, house photo and the full administrative hierarchy (state → district → block → panchayat → village) mean every row can be found again, de-duplicated and audited. In a digital survey most of this is captured automatically — which is exactly what stops a ‘surveyed’ home from being a fabricated one.

3. Household roster

One row per member is the heart of the survey. It gives you household size, age-sex structure, education and occupation in a form you can actually analyse. Keep it a grid, not a paragraph — consistent columns per person are what make the data add up later.

4–5. Housing & assets

House type, water, toilet, cooking fuel, electricity and asset ownership are the standard proxies for living standard and welfare eligibility. They are quick to ask, hard to fake, and comparable to national surveys — which is why almost every socio-economic format includes them.

6. Income & livelihood

Ask income as a band, not an exact rupee figure — respondents answer bands honestly and refuse exact numbers. Pair it with occupation and number of earners to sense-check it.

7. Programme module

This is the only part that changes per project. Isolating it in one section is what lets you reuse 80% of the questionnaire across programmes and still keep the data comparable.

8. Consent & verification

Never optional. Explicit, recorded consent protects the respondent and you; the enumerator declaration and supervisor back-check are what make the data defensible.

Sample household survey questions

Concrete beats abstract. Here are example questions in the right form — single-idea, non-leading, with defined answer options (the format that produces clean, codeable data):

• What is the main source of drinking water for this household? — Piped into dwelling / Public tap / Borewell or handpump / Well / Tanker / Other.
• What type of toilet facility does the household use? — Own flush toilet / Own pit latrine / Shared / Public / None (open defecation).
• How many hours of electricity does the household get on a typical day? — None / 1–4 / 5–8 / 9–16 / 17–24 hours.
• What is the approximate total monthly income of the household? — Under ₹5,000 / ₹5,000–10,000 / ₹10,000–20,000 / ₹20,000–40,000 / Above ₹40,000.
• Which of these does the household own? (multi-select) — TV / Refrigerator / Smartphone / Two-wheeler / Four-wheeler / Agricultural land / Livestock.

Open vs closed questions: designing for clean data

The single biggest quality lever in a questionnaire is how you ask. A few rules the format above follows:

• Prefer closed questions with fixed options. They code instantly and compare across households. Reserve open text for the one or two things you genuinely can't pre-list.
• One idea per question. “Do you have electricity and a toilet?” is two questions pretending to be one — split them.
• Never lead the answer. Ask “What do you use for cooking?”, not “You use LPG, right?”
• Ask sensitive items as bands or ranges. Income, land and age get more honest answers as ranges than as exact figures.
• Keep it short. A 15–20 minute questionnaire gets completed honestly; a 45-minute one gets rushed and guessed at the door.

Paper format vs a digital questionnaire

You can run this format on paper, but at any real scale a digital questionnaire wins on every axis: the fields marked auto (GPS, timestamp, photo) are captured without typing, skip-logic hides irrelevant questions, answers are validated as they are entered, and there is no error-prone data-entry step afterwards. Most importantly, a digital form makes each visit verifiable. See how it works on a household survey app.

How Anaxee helps

Anaxee — India's Reach Engine, a National Startup Award winner working with 350+ brands and organisations — doesn't just hand you a format; we run the survey end to end across 540 districts and 11,000+ pincodes. We'll configure this exact questionnaire as a mobile form, train local enumerators on it, capture every household door-to-door with geo-tags and photos, run AI quality checks and deliver clean data to a live dashboard. It's part of our field data-collection work — start with the household survey guide or the types of household surveys.

Proof on the ground — household-level fieldwork we've run

29.8 lakhpeople counselled, door to doorProject SwarakshaRead case study →1,60,000+counselled · 2,500+ assets verifiedCSR & Relief VerificationRead case study →2,42,672households · 3,667 villagesDeHaatRead case study →

Millions of household-level visits across social-impact, agri and field programmes. See all case studies →

Related reading

Household survey in India: complete guide →The household survey app →

What happens when you reach out to Anaxee

1. Send us your questionnaire — or use the format above as the starting point.
2. A real person calls back — our Indore team, within one working day.
3. We configure & pilot it — as a mobile form, tested on a verified household sample before you scale.

A 130+ person team in Indore and 40,000+ Digital Runners on the ground — your questionnaire reaches people who run household surveys every day, not an inbox that goes quiet.

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line

A good household survey format is modular, mostly closed-ended, short enough to finish honestly, and built so every visit is verifiable. Copy the template above, swap Section 7 for your programme, and pilot it before you scale. And when you want it configured and run across India — door to door, geo-tagged and quality-checked — that's exactly what Anaxee does.