The most widely used data source on college and university finances is the US Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which gathers a broad array of data annually from higher education institutions. The Urban Institute has made available a harmonized version of the IPEDS finance files through its Education Data Portal. This user guide provides an overview of the IPEDS finance data, a description of issues to be aware of when conducting analyses using these data, and an online Excel appendix with a detailed mapping of each variable to variables in the original IPEDS data, along with the year range each is available.