East Prairie, MO population, income and ZIP codes

East Prairie city is a small town in Missouri, with 2,930 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #206 of 1,082 ranked by population — larger than 81% of them. The median age here is 40.6 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly older 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 East Prairie city earn a median of $31,159 a year, 60.3% below the national figure of $78,538 and 44% below 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 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 East Prairie city is valued at $58,000, 80.9% below the national figure and 62% below the $152,400 peer median, while median gross rent runs $825 a month, 41.3% below the national figure, or roughly $9,900 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 31.8% 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 1.9×, 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. 42.5% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, a renter-majority market, so rent figures matter more here than the home-value line. Gross rent folds in the utilities a tenant pays separately, so it is closer to the real monthly outlay than a headline rent figure.

East Prairie city is the unusual combination of expensive to rent and cheap to buy: rent takes 31.8% of median income while homes cost only 1.9× it. Where that pattern shows up, the gap is normally down to down-payment and credit barriers rather than price.

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.