Essex, MT population, income and ZIP codes

Essex CDP is a very small community in Montana, with 57 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #364 of 497 ranked by population — larger than 26% of them. The median age here is 63.1 years against 39.1 nationally, a markedly older profile that usually tracks retirees staying put and younger households leaving for work. 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 Essex CDP earn a median of $73,393 a year, 6.6% below the national figure of $78,538 and 17% above the $62,992 median for the 94 Montana 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 12.3% of residents here, below the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in Essex CDP is valued at $329,200, 8.5% above the national figure and 31% above the $250,900 peer median, while median gross rent runs not published a month. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 4.5×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is harder here than in the average US market. 100% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, an owner-dominated market where rental listings are scarce and rent medians rest on a thin sample. The rent line includes utilities paid by the tenant, a definition worth remembering when comparing it against a landlord's quoted rate.

A median age of 63.1 puts Essex CDP well into retirement-weighted territory, which pulls median household income down even where household wealth is high, because retirement draws are counted differently from wages. With 57 residents, a handful of survey responses moves every median on this page. Compare Essex CDP against its county rather than against national figures.

The Census withheld gross rent for Essex CDP because the sample was too thin to publish at this geography. Those values were suppressed at the source, not lost in our dataset, and we do not model a replacement. Everything else on this page comes straight from the ACS 2019-2023 ACS 5-year tables.