Rock Island, IL population, income and ZIP codes

Rock Island city is a small city in Illinois, with 36,758 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #50 of 1,462 ranked by population — larger than 96% of them. The median age here is 37.1 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly younger 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 Island city earn a median of $57,292 a year, 27.1% below the national figure of $78,538 and 23% 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 20.9% 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 Island city is valued at $118,400, 61% below the national figure and 34% below the $179,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs $819 a month, 41.7% below the national figure, or roughly $9,828 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 17.2% 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 2.1×, 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. 63.5% 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.