Wasco, CA population, income and ZIP codes

Wasco city is a small city in California, with 26,222 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #291 of 1,618 ranked by population — larger than 82% of them. The median age here is 30.4 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 Wasco city earn a median of $55,521 a year, 29.3% 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 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 Wasco city is valued at $251,900, 17% below the national figure and 57% below the $589,600 peer median, while median gross rent runs $991 a month, 29.5% below the national figure, or roughly $11,892 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 21.4% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is within the standard affordability guideline. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 4.5×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is harder here than in the average US market. 59.1% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans more heavily on renters. Gross rent folds in the utilities a tenant pays separately, so it is closer to the real monthly outlay than a headline rent figure.

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.