Promise City, IA population, income and ZIP codes

Promise City city is a very small community in Iowa, with 86 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #880 of 1,026 ranked by population — larger than 14% of them. The median age here is 54.5 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 Promise City city earn a median of $41,406 a year, 47.3% below the national figure of $78,538 and 39% 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 19.8% 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 Promise City city is valued at $52,800, 82.6% below the national figure and 66% below the $156,300 peer median, while median gross rent runs not published a month. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 1.3×, 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. 86% 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 54.5 puts Promise City 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 86 residents, a handful of survey responses moves every median on this page. Compare Promise City city against its county rather than against national figures.

The Census withheld gross rent for Promise City 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.