Forest, MS population, income and ZIP codes

Forest city is a mid-size town in Mississippi, with 5,365 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #67 of 427 ranked by population — larger than 84% of them. The median age here is 38.2 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 Forest city earn a median of $51,082 a year, 35% below the national figure of $78,538 and 16% above the $44,178 median for the 191 Mississippi 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 23.2% 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 Forest city is valued at $129,100, 57.4% below the national figure and 6% above the $121,300 peer median, while median gross rent runs $695 a month, 50.6% below the national figure, or roughly $8,340 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 16.3% 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 2.5×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is easier here than in the average US market. 50.6% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans more heavily on renters. Gross rent folds in the utilities a tenant pays separately, so it is closer to the real monthly outlay than a headline rent figure.

Every value on this page is published directly by the Census for this area — nothing is modelled or interpolated. 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.