Alturas, CA population, income and ZIP codes

Alturas city is a small town in California, with 2,703 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #826 of 1,618 ranked by population — larger than 48% of them. The median age here is 45.2 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 Alturas city earn a median of $54,634 a year, 30.4% below the national figure of $78,538 and 40% below the $91,111 median for the 1,050 California 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 23.3% 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 Alturas city is valued at $152,600, 49.7% below the national figure and 74% below the $589,600 peer median, while median gross rent runs $781 a month, 44.5% below the national figure, or roughly $9,372 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 17.2% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is cheap relative to what people here earn. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 2.8×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is easier here than in the average US market. 67.1% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans toward owners. The rent line includes utilities paid by the tenant, a definition worth remembering when comparing it against a landlord's quoted rate.

Every value on this page is published directly by the Census for this area — nothing is modelled or interpolated. 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.