Bell City, MO population, income and ZIP codes

Bell City city is a very small community in Missouri, with 554 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #497 of 1,082 ranked by population — larger than 54% of them. The median age here is 37.2 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly younger profile than the country as a whole. 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 Bell City city earn a median of $31,058 a year, 60.5% below the national figure of $78,538 and 44% below the $55,543 median for the 374 Missouri 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 30.7% 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 Bell City city is valued at $50,000, 83.5% below the national figure and 67% below the $152,400 peer median, while median gross rent runs $367 a month, 73.9% below the national figure, or roughly $4,404 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 14.2% 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 1.6×, 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. 56.2% 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.

With 554 residents, a handful of survey responses moves every median on this page. Compare Bell City city against its county rather than against national figures.

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.