Paducah, KY population, income and ZIP codes

Paducah city is a small city in Kentucky, with 26,894 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #16 of 554 ranked by population — larger than 97% of them. The median age here is 43.2 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 Paducah city earn a median of $51,243 a year, 34.8% below the national figure of $78,538 and 8% below the $55,469 median for the 246 Kentucky 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 21.5% 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 Paducah city is valued at $164,600, 45.7% below the national figure and 5% above the $157,200 peer median, while median gross rent runs $817 a month, 41.9% below the national figure, or roughly $9,804 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 19.1% 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. 54.1% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans more heavily on renters. The rent line includes utilities paid by the tenant, a definition worth remembering when comparing it against a landlord's quoted rate.

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.