Palmer, IA population, income and ZIP codes

Palmer city is a very small community in Iowa, with 114 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #839 of 1,026 ranked by population — larger than 18% of them. The median age here is 52.8 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 Palmer city earn a median of $60,625 a year, 22.8% below the national figure of $78,538 and 11% 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 31.6% 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 Palmer city is valued at $36,500, 88% below the national figure and 77% below the $156,300 peer median, while median gross rent runs not published a month. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 0.6×, 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. 92.3% 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.

A median age of 52.8 puts Palmer 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 114 residents, a handful of survey responses moves every median on this page. Compare Palmer city against its county rather than against national figures.

The Census withheld gross rent for Palmer 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.