McDowell, KY population, income and ZIP codes

McDowell CDP is a very small community in Kentucky, with 549 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #339 of 554 ranked by population — larger than 38% of them. The median age here is 55.2 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 McDowell CDP earn a median of $35,576 a year, 54.7% below the national figure of $78,538 and 36% 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 41% 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 McDowell CDP is valued at $73,600, 75.7% below the national figure and 53% below the $157,200 peer median, while median gross rent runs not published a month. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 2.1×, 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. 82.5% 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. The rent line includes utilities paid by the tenant, a definition worth remembering when comparing it against a landlord's quoted rate.

A median age of 55.2 puts McDowell CDP 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 549 residents, a handful of survey responses moves every median on this page. Compare McDowell CDP against its county rather than against national figures.

The Census withheld gross rent for McDowell CDP 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.