Forest City, NC population, income and ZIP codes

Forest City town is a mid-size town in North Carolina, with 7,368 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #127 of 777 ranked by population — larger than 83% of them. The median age here is 34.8 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 Forest City town earn a median of $35,897 a year, 54.3% below the national figure of $78,538 and 41% below the $61,228 median for the 459 North Carolina 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 33.6% 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 Forest City town is valued at $142,100, 53.2% below the national figure and 35% below the $219,800 peer median, while median gross rent runs $815 a month, 42% below the national figure, or roughly $9,780 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 27.2% 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 4×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is harder here than in the average US market. 41.1% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, a renter-majority market, so rent figures matter more here than the home-value line. 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.