Roanoke Rapids, NC population, income and ZIP codes

Roanoke Rapids city is a mid-size town in North Carolina, with 15,024 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #71 of 777 ranked by population — larger than 90% of them. The median age here is 38 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 Roanoke Rapids city earn a median of $53,981 a year, 31.3% below the national figure of $78,538 and 12% below the $61,228 median for the 459 North Carolina 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 21.8% 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 Roanoke Rapids city is valued at $129,400, 57.4% below the national figure and 41% below the $219,800 peer median, while median gross rent runs $816 a month, 42% below the national figure, or roughly $9,792 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 18.1% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is cheap relative to what people here earn. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 2.4×, 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. 49.9% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans more heavily on renters. Rent is reported gross — contract rent plus tenant-paid utilities — which is why it runs above the advertised price on a listing for the same unit.

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.