Benton Harbor, MI population, income and ZIP codes

Benton Harbor city is a mid-size town in Michigan, with 9,023 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #111 of 745 ranked by population — larger than 85% of them. The median age here is 33.2 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 Benton Harbor city earn a median of $29,652 a year, 62.2% below the national figure of $78,538 and 52% below the $61,715 median for the 438 Michigan 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 41.9% 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 Benton Harbor city is valued at $75,500, 75.1% below the national figure and 55% below the $166,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs $775 a month, 44.9% below the national figure, or roughly $9,300 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 31.4% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is a stretch on median earnings. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 2.5×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is easier here than in the average US market. 36.5% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, a renter-majority market, so rent figures matter more here than the home-value line. 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.

Benton Harbor city is the unusual combination of expensive to rent and cheap to buy: rent takes 31.4% of median income while homes cost only 2.5× it. Where that pattern shows up, the gap is normally down to down-payment and credit barriers rather than price.

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.