Cotton Plant, AR population, income and ZIP codes

Cotton Plant city is a very small community in Arkansas, with 411 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #335 of 625 ranked by population — larger than 46% of them. The median age here is 55 years against 39.1 nationally, a markedly older profile that usually tracks retirees staying put and younger households leaving for work. 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 Cotton Plant city earn a median of $12,043 a year, 84.7% below the national figure of $78,538 and 76% below the $49,306 median for the 209 Arkansas cities we cover. Household income here is measured before tax and pooled across everyone at the address, which is why it reads higher than typical individual earnings in the same area. Poverty reaches 56.4% of residents here, well above the 12.4% national rate, which is the single clearest signal in this dataset that median income here is carried by a narrow band of households.

The typical owner-occupied home in Cotton Plant city is valued at $37,000, 87.8% below the national figure and 71% below the $128,900 peer median, while median gross rent runs $537 a month, 61.8% below the national figure, or roughly $6,444 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 53.5% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is severely stretched — a median-income renter clears the cost-burden line by a wide margin before utilities beyond the gross-rent definition. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 3.1×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is easier here than in the average US market. 43.3% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, a renter-majority market, so rent figures matter more here than the home-value line. Gross rent folds in the utilities a tenant pays separately, so it is closer to the real monthly outlay than a headline rent figure.

Cotton Plant city is the unusual combination of expensive to rent and cheap to buy: rent takes 53.5% of median income while homes cost only 3.1× it. Where that pattern shows up, the gap is normally down to down-payment and credit barriers rather than price. A median age of 55 puts Cotton Plant city well into retirement-weighted territory, which pulls median household income down even where household wealth is high, because retirement draws are counted differently from wages.

All values below were released by the Census for this exact geography, with no gap-filling on our side. Small-area estimates still carry wider margins of error than state or national figures, so check the linked ACS tables before relying on them for lending, appraisal or legal work.