El Cerro Mission, NM population, income and ZIP codes

El Cerro Mission CDP is a mid-size town in New Mexico, with 5,101 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #46 of 527 ranked by population — larger than 91% 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 El Cerro Mission CDP earn a median of $49,719 a year, 36.7% below the national figure of $78,538 and 8% below the $54,029 median for the 153 New Mexico 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 26.2% 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 El Cerro Mission CDP is valued at $101,000, 66.7% below the national figure and 47% below the $190,000 peer median, while median gross rent runs $1,289 a month, 8.3% below the national figure, or roughly $15,468 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 31.1% 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 2×, 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. 81.5% 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. Rent is reported gross — contract rent plus tenant-paid utilities — which is why it runs above the advertised price on a listing for the same unit.

El Cerro Mission CDP is the unusual combination of expensive to rent and cheap to buy: rent takes 31.1% of median income while homes cost only 2× it. Where that pattern shows up, the gap is normally down to down-payment and credit barriers rather than price.

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.