St. Elmo, IL population, income and ZIP codes

St. Elmo city is a small town in Illinois, with 1,401 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #605 of 1,462 ranked by population — larger than 58% of them. The median age here is 37.6 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly younger 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 St. Elmo city earn a median of $47,115 a year, 40% below the national figure of $78,538 and 37% 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 23.7% 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 St. Elmo city is valued at $80,300, 73.5% below the national figure and 55% below the $179,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs $759 a month, 46% below the national figure, or roughly $9,108 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 19.3% 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. 83.6% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, an owner-dominated market where rental listings are scarce and rent medians rest on a thin sample. The rent line includes utilities paid by the tenant, a definition worth remembering when comparing it against a landlord's quoted rate.

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.