Bay City, MI population, income and ZIP codes

Bay City city is a small city in Michigan, with 32,445 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #34 of 745 ranked by population — larger than 95% of them. The median age here is 39.7 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 Bay City city earn a median of $47,904 a year, 39% below the national figure of $78,538 and 22% below the $61,715 median for the 438 Michigan 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 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 Bay City city is valued at $89,900, 70.4% below the national figure and 46% below the $166,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs $739 a month, 47.4% below the national figure, or roughly $8,868 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 18.5% 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 1.9×, 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. 68.5% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans toward owners. 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.