Smithfield, NC population, income and ZIP codes

Smithfield town is a mid-size town in North Carolina, with 11,798 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #83 of 777 ranked by population — larger than 89% of them. The median age here is 42.7 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 Smithfield town earn a median of $37,827 a year, 51.8% below the national figure of $78,538 and 38% 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 31.4% 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 Smithfield town is valued at $217,000, 28.5% below the national figure and within a couple of points of the $219,800 peer median, while median gross rent runs $601 a month, 57.3% below the national figure, or roughly $7,212 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 19.1% 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 5.7×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is harder here than in the average US market. 49.4% 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.

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.