Tucumcari, NM population, income and ZIP codes

Tucumcari city is a mid-size town in New Mexico, with 5,197 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #45 of 527 ranked by population — larger than 91% of them. The median age here is 40.9 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly older 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 Tucumcari city earn a median of $39,915 a year, 49.2% below the national figure of $78,538 and 26% below the $54,029 median for the 153 New Mexico cities we cover. The median is the midpoint household, not an average, so a handful of very high earners cannot drag it upward the way they distort a mean. Poverty reaches 31.2% 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 Tucumcari city is valued at $56,400, 81.4% below the national figure and 70% below the $190,000 peer median, while median gross rent runs $751 a month, 46.6% below the national figure, or roughly $9,012 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 22.6% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is within the standard affordability guideline. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 1.4×, 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. 67.8% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans toward owners. The rent line includes utilities paid by the tenant, a definition worth remembering when comparing it against a landlord's quoted rate.

No figure on this page is estimated by us; each one comes straight from the published ACS tables for this area. 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.