Alpena, MI population, income and ZIP codes

Alpena city is a mid-size town in Michigan, with 10,178 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #100 of 745 ranked by population — larger than 86% of them. The median age here is 45.2 years against 39.1 nationally, a markedly older profile that usually tracks retirees staying put and younger households leaving for work. 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 Alpena city earn a median of $47,604 a year, 39.4% below the national figure of $78,538 and 23% below the $61,715 median for the 438 Michigan 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 19.2% 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 Alpena city is valued at $110,400, 63.6% below the national figure and 34% below the $166,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs $599 a month, 57.4% below the national figure, or roughly $7,188 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 15.1% 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 2.3×, 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. 65.1% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans toward owners. Gross rent folds in the utilities a tenant pays separately, so it is closer to the real monthly outlay than a headline rent figure.

No figure on this page is estimated by us; each one comes straight from the published ACS tables for this area. 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.