Kaktovik, AK population, income and ZIP codes

Kaktovik city is a very small community in Alaska, with 153 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #206 of 355 ranked by population — larger than 42% of them. The median age here is 32.4 years against 39.1 nationally, a distinctly younger profile, typical of places with students, military posts or a fast-growing family population. At this population the ACS sample is small, so the margin of error around every dollar figure below is wide — treat the numbers as a band, not a point, and expect them to move between annual releases without the place itself changing.

Households in Kaktovik city earn a median of $88,750 a year, 13% above the national figure of $78,538 and 9% above the $81,250 median for the 73 Alaska cities we cover. Median household income counts every pre-tax dollar arriving at an address — wages, self-employment, Social Security, pensions, interest and public assistance — for everyone living there, so multi-earner households pull the figure up even where individual pay is modest. Poverty reaches 18.1% of residents here, above the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in Kaktovik city is valued at $102,100, 66.3% below the national figure and 67% below the $305,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs not published a month. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 1.2×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so purchase prices are unusually low against local pay, the pattern in places where supply is plentiful and wage growth has been flat. 85.1% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, an owner-dominated market where rental listings are scarce and rent medians rest on a thin sample. Rent is reported gross — contract rent plus tenant-paid utilities — which is why it runs above the advertised price on a listing for the same unit.

Median income runs above the national figure while poverty also runs above it — a split distribution, not a uniformly comfortable place. Averages hide that; the two numbers together do not. With 153 residents, a handful of survey responses moves every median on this page. Compare Kaktovik city against its county rather than against national figures.

The Census withheld gross rent for Kaktovik city because the sample was too thin to publish at this geography. Those values were suppressed at the source, not lost in our dataset, and we do not model a replacement. Everything else on this page comes straight from the ACS 2019-2023 ACS 5-year tables.