Cape Girardeau, MO population, income and ZIP codes

Cape Girardeau city is a small city in Missouri, with 40,047 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #17 of 1,082 ranked by population — larger than 98% of them. The median age here is 34.2 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 Cape Girardeau city earn a median of $54,870 a year, 30.1% below the national figure of $78,538 and within a couple of points of the $55,543 median for the 374 Missouri 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 20.7% 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 Cape Girardeau city is valued at $186,100, 38.7% below the national figure and 22% above the $152,400 peer median, while median gross rent runs $855 a month, 39.2% below the national figure, or roughly $10,260 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 18.7% 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 3.4×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is easier here than in the average US market. 52.2% 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.

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.