Defiance, IA population, income and ZIP codes

Defiance city is a very small community in Iowa, with 207 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #689 of 1,026 ranked by population — larger than 32% of them. The median age here is 48.5 years against 39.1 nationally, a markedly older profile that usually tracks retirees staying put and younger households leaving for work. 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 Defiance city earn a median of $51,458 a year, 34.5% below the national figure of $78,538 and 24% below the $67,791 median for the 290 Iowa 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 15.9% of residents here, above the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in Defiance city is valued at $84,300, 72.2% below the national figure and 46% below the $156,300 peer median, while median gross rent runs not published a month. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 1.6×, 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. 85.4% 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 207 residents, a handful of survey responses moves every median on this page. Compare Defiance city against its county rather than against national figures.

The Census withheld gross rent for Defiance city because the sample was too thin to publish at this geography. Those values were suppressed at the source, not lost in our dataset, and we do not model a replacement. Everything else on this page comes straight from the ACS 2019-2023 ACS 5-year tables.