Rensselaer, NY population, income and ZIP codes

Rensselaer city is a mid-size town in New York, with 9,247 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #217 of 1,292 ranked by population — larger than 83% of them. The median age here is 38.9 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 Rensselaer city earn a median of $66,046 a year, 15.9% below the national figure of $78,538 and 28% 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 19.6% 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 Rensselaer city is valued at $202,600, 33.2% below the national figure and 36% below the $315,800 peer median, while median gross rent runs $1,180 a month, 16.1% below the national figure, or roughly $14,160 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 21.4% 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 3.1×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is easier here than in the average US market. 44.9% 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.

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.