East St. Louis, IL population, income and ZIP codes

East St. Louis city is a mid-size town in Illinois, with 18,278 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #137 of 1,462 ranked by population — larger than 90% of them. The median age here is 45.1 years against 39.1 nationally, a markedly older profile that usually tracks retirees staying put and younger households leaving for work. 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 East St. Louis city earn a median of $30,992 a year, 60.5% below the national figure of $78,538 and 58% below 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 32.8% 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 East St. Louis city is valued at $52,700, 82.6% below the national figure and 71% below the $179,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs $597 a month, 57.5% below the national figure, or roughly $7,164 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 23.1% 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 1.7×, 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. 54.3% 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.

No figure on this page is estimated by us; each one comes straight from the published ACS tables for this area. 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.