Rock Falls, IL population, income and ZIP codes

Rock Falls city is a mid-size town in Illinois, with 8,683 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #251 of 1,462 ranked by population — larger than 82% of them. The median age here is 39.9 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 Rock Falls city earn a median of $48,733 a year, 37.9% below the national figure of $78,538 and 34% below the $74,244 median for the 698 Illinois 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 22.7% 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 Rock Falls city is valued at $82,400, 72.8% below the national figure and 54% below the $179,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs $745 a month, 47% below the national figure, or roughly $8,940 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 18.3% 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 1.7×, 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. 65.6% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans toward owners. The rent line includes utilities paid by the tenant, a definition worth remembering when comparing it against a landlord's quoted rate.

All values below were released by the Census for this exact geography, with no gap-filling on our side. 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.