Parmele, NC population, income and ZIP codes

Parmele town is a very small community in North Carolina, with 288 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #666 of 777 ranked by population — larger than 14% of them. The median age here is 59.1 years against 39.1 nationally, a markedly older profile that usually tracks retirees staying put and younger households leaving for work. At this population the ACS sample is small, so the margin of error around every dollar figure below is wide — treat the numbers as a band, not a point, and expect them to move between annual releases without the place itself changing.

Households in Parmele town earn a median of $28,971 a year, 63.1% below the national figure of $78,538 and 53% 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 34% 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 Parmele town is valued at $81,900, 73% below the national figure and 63% below the $219,800 peer median, while median gross rent runs $1,042 a month, 25.9% below the national figure, or roughly $12,504 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 43.2% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is severely stretched — a median-income renter clears the cost-burden line by a wide margin before utilities beyond the gross-rent definition. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 2.8×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is easier here than in the average US market. 81.6% 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. Gross rent folds in the utilities a tenant pays separately, so it is closer to the real monthly outlay than a headline rent figure.

Parmele town is the unusual combination of expensive to rent and cheap to buy: rent takes 43.2% of median income while homes cost only 2.8× it. Where that pattern shows up, the gap is normally down to down-payment and credit barriers rather than price. A median age of 59.1 puts Parmele town well into retirement-weighted territory, which pulls median household income down even where household wealth is high, because retirement draws are counted differently from wages.

All values below were released by the Census for this exact geography, with no gap-filling on our side. 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.