Bear Lake, PA population, income and ZIP codes

Bear Lake borough is a very small community in Pennsylvania, with 132 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #1827 of 2,002 ranked by population — larger than 8% of them. The median age here is 47 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 Bear Lake borough earn a median of $33,125 a year, 57.8% below the national figure of $78,538 and 53% below the $71,118 median for the 982 Pennsylvania 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 18.2% of residents here, above the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in Bear Lake borough is valued at $64,000, 78.9% below the national figure and 67% below the $193,200 peer median, while median gross rent runs not published a month. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 1.9×, 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. 76.9% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans toward owners. The rent line includes utilities paid by the tenant, a definition worth remembering when comparing it against a landlord's quoted rate.

With 132 residents, a handful of survey responses moves every median on this page. Compare Bear Lake borough against its county rather than against national figures.

The Census withheld gross rent for Bear Lake borough because the sample was too thin to publish at this geography. Those values were suppressed at the source, not lost in our dataset, and we do not model a replacement. Everything else on this page comes straight from the ACS 2019-2023 ACS 5-year tables.