Cairo, IL population, income and ZIP codes

Cairo city is a small town in Illinois, with 1,699 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #544 of 1,462 ranked by population — larger than 62% of them. The median age here is 43.2 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly older 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 Cairo city earn a median of $35,493 a year, 54.8% below the national figure of $78,538 and 52% below the $74,244 median for the 698 Illinois 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 21.5% 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 Cairo city is valued at $28,200, 90.7% below the national figure and 84% below the $179,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs $282 a month, 79.9% below the national figure, or roughly $3,384 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 9.5% 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 0.8×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so purchase prices are unusually low against local pay, the pattern in places where supply is plentiful and wage growth has been flat. 64.9% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans more heavily on renters. Rent is reported gross — contract rent plus tenant-paid utilities — which is why it runs above the advertised price on a listing for the same unit.

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.