Lake Isabella, CA population, income and ZIP codes

Lake Isabella CDP is a small town in California, with 3,654 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #738 of 1,618 ranked by population — larger than 54% of them. The median age here is 36.9 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly younger profile than the country as a whole. 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 Lake Isabella CDP earn a median of $26,763 a year, 65.9% below the national figure of $78,538 and 71% 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 38.6% 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 Lake Isabella CDP is valued at $112,200, 63% below the national figure and 81% below the $589,600 peer median, while median gross rent runs $1,138 a month, 19.1% below the national figure, or roughly $13,656 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 51% 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 4.2×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is harder here than in the average US market. 61.8% 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.

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.