Watson, IL population, income and ZIP codes

Watson village is a very small community in Illinois, with 616 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #862 of 1,462 ranked by population — larger than 41% of them. The median age here is 41.4 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly older 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 Watson village earn a median of $68,625 a year, 12.6% below the national figure of $78,538 and 8% below the $74,244 median for the 698 Illinois cities we cover. The median is the midpoint household, not an average, so a handful of very high earners cannot drag it upward the way they distort a mean. Poverty reaches 20.6% 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 Watson village is valued at $93,900, 69.1% below the national figure and 48% below the $179,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs $750 a month, 46.7% below the national figure, or roughly $9,000 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 13.1% 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. 82.3% 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. Gross rent folds in the utilities a tenant pays separately, so it is closer to the real monthly outlay than a headline rent figure.

With 616 residents, a handful of survey responses moves every median on this page. Compare Watson village against its county rather than against national figures.

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.