Chester, IL population, income and ZIP codes

Chester city is a mid-size town in Illinois, with 6,830 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #289 of 1,462 ranked by population — larger than 80% of them. The median age here is 43.5 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly older 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 Chester city earn a median of $74,673 a year, 4.9% below the national figure of $78,538 and within a couple of points of the $74,244 median for the 698 Illinois cities we cover. Household income here is measured before tax and pooled across everyone at the address, which is why it reads higher than typical individual earnings in the same area. Poverty reaches 19.5% 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 Chester city is valued at $107,800, 64.5% below the national figure and 40% below the $179,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs $642 a month, 54.3% below the national figure, or roughly $7,704 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 10.3% 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 1.4×, 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. 71% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans toward owners. 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.