Ottosen, IA population, income and ZIP codes

Ottosen city is a very small community in Iowa, with 31 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #980 of 1,026 ranked by population — larger than 4% of them. The median age here is 51.5 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 Ottosen city earn a median of $43,125 a year, 45.1% below the national figure of $78,538 and 36% below the $67,791 median for the 290 Iowa 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 6.5% of residents here, below the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in Ottosen city is valued at $65,000, 78.6% below the national figure and 58% below the $156,300 peer median, while median gross rent runs not published a month. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 1.5×, 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. 84.6% 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. 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.

A median age of 51.5 puts Ottosen city well into retirement-weighted territory, which pulls median household income down even where household wealth is high, because retirement draws are counted differently from wages. With 31 residents, a handful of survey responses moves every median on this page. Compare Ottosen city against its county rather than against national figures.

The Census withheld gross rent for Ottosen 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.