Bell Gardens, CA population, income and ZIP codes

Bell Gardens city is a small city in California, with 38,661 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #221 of 1,618 ranked by population — larger than 86% of them. The median age here is 32 years against 39.1 nationally, a distinctly younger profile, typical of places with students, military posts or a fast-growing family population. Places under 65,000 residents only appear in the five-year release, never the one-year file, so these values pool sixty months of responses and lag the current year by design.

Households in Bell Gardens city earn a median of $55,372 a year, 29.5% below the national figure of $78,538 and 39% below the $91,111 median for the 1,050 California cities we cover. This figure covers the household, not the worker: two people on ordinary wages at one address outrank a single professional in the same table. Poverty reaches 21.8% 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 Bell Gardens city is valued at $527,900, 74% above the national figure and 10% below the $589,600 peer median, while median gross rent runs $1,658 a month, 17.9% above the national figure, or roughly $19,896 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 35.9% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is a stretch on median earnings. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 9.5×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is out of reach on local earnings alone and the ownership market leans on outside income, equity or dual high earners. 21.2% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, a renter-majority market, so rent figures matter more here than the home-value line. The rent line includes utilities paid by the tenant, a definition worth remembering when comparing it against a landlord's quoted rate.

Home values sit at 9.5× median household income, far past the 3.9× national mark, so ownership costs here are set by something other than local wages — second homes, retirees with equity, or commuters earning elsewhere.

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.