Ashland, KY population, income and ZIP codes

Ashland city is a mid-size town in Kentucky, with 21,405 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #18 of 554 ranked by population — larger than 96% of them. The median age here is 41.1 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly older 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 Ashland city earn a median of $52,199 a year, 33.5% below the national figure of $78,538 and 6% below the $55,469 median for the 246 Kentucky cities we cover. This figure covers the household, not the worker: two people on ordinary wages at one address outrank a single professional in the same table. Poverty reaches 22.8% 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 Ashland city is valued at $125,300, 58.7% below the national figure and 20% below the $157,200 peer median, while median gross rent runs $859 a month, 38.9% below the national figure, or roughly $10,308 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 19.7% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is cheap relative to what people here earn. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 2.4×, 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. 59.9% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans more heavily on renters. Gross rent folds in the utilities a tenant pays separately, so it is closer to the real monthly outlay than a headline rent figure.

Every value on this page is published directly by the Census for this area — nothing is modelled or interpolated. 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.