Desert Hot Springs, CA population, income and ZIP codes

Desert Hot Springs city is a small city in California, with 32,786 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #248 of 1,618 ranked by population — larger than 84% of them. The median age here is 34.4 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly younger profile than the country as a whole. 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 Desert Hot Springs city earn a median of $50,349 a year, 35.9% below the national figure of $78,538 and 45% 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 19.2% 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 Desert Hot Springs city is valued at $309,300, 1.9% above the national figure and 48% below the $589,600 peer median, while median gross rent runs $1,339 a month, 4.8% below the national figure, or roughly $16,068 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 31.9% 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 6.1×, 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. 49.9% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans more heavily on renters. 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 6.1× 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.

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.