Berea, KY population, income and ZIP codes

Berea city is a mid-size town in Kentucky, with 15,557 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #29 of 554 ranked by population — larger than 94% of them. The median age here is 34.1 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly younger 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 Berea city earn a median of $56,484 a year, 28.1% below the national figure of $78,538 and within a couple of points of the $55,469 median for the 246 Kentucky 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 19.5% 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 Berea city is valued at $178,000, 41.3% below the national figure and 13% above the $157,200 peer median, while median gross rent runs $806 a month, 42.7% below the national figure, or roughly $9,672 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 17.1% 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 3.2×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is easier here than in the average US market. 57.3% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans more heavily on renters. 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.

All values below were released by the Census for this exact geography, with no gap-filling on our side. 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.