Water Valley, MS population, income and ZIP codes

Water Valley city is a small town in Mississippi, with 3,380 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #91 of 427 ranked by population — larger than 78% of them. The median age here is 32.9 years against 39.1 nationally, a distinctly younger profile, typical of places with students, military posts or a fast-growing family population. At this population the ACS sample is small, so the margin of error around every dollar figure below is wide — treat the numbers as a band, not a point, and expect them to move between annual releases without the place itself changing.

Households in Water Valley city earn a median of $47,167 a year, 39.9% below the national figure of $78,538 and 7% above the $44,178 median for the 191 Mississippi 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 27.5% 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 Water Valley city is valued at $111,000, 63.4% below the national figure and 8% below the $121,300 peer median, while median gross rent runs $592 a month, 57.9% below the national figure, or roughly $7,104 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 2.4×, 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. 55.6% 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.

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.