Dunkirk, NY population, income and ZIP codes

Dunkirk city is a mid-size town in New York, with 12,597 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #156 of 1,292 ranked by population — larger than 87% of them. The median age here is 43.1 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 Dunkirk city earn a median of $49,003 a year, 37.6% below the national figure of $78,538 and 47% below the $91,806 median for the 847 New York 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 24.9% 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 Dunkirk city is valued at $91,200, 69.9% below the national figure and 71% below the $315,800 peer median, while median gross rent runs $905 a month, 35.6% below the national figure, or roughly $10,860 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 22.2% 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 1.9×, 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. 58.4% 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.

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.