East Chicago, IN population, income and ZIP codes

East Chicago city is a small city in Indiana, with 26,158 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #39 of 976 ranked by population — larger than 96% of them. The median age here is 36.5 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 East Chicago city earn a median of $41,071 a year, 47.7% below the national figure of $78,538 and 33% below the $61,527 median for the 355 Indiana 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 27% 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 Chicago city is valued at $92,400, 69.5% below the national figure and 37% below the $145,600 peer median, while median gross rent runs $820 a month, 41.7% below the national figure, or roughly $9,840 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 24% 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 2.2×, 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. 44.1% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, a renter-majority market, so rent figures matter more here than the home-value line. Rent is reported gross — contract rent plus tenant-paid utilities — which is why it runs above the advertised price on a listing for the same unit.

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.