Chester, PA population, income and ZIP codes

Chester city is a small city in Pennsylvania, with 33,209 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #16 of 2,002 ranked by population — larger than 99% of them. The median age here is 33.3 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 Chester city earn a median of $39,809 a year, 49.3% below the national figure of $78,538 and 44% below the $71,118 median for the 982 Pennsylvania cities we cover. Household income here is measured before tax and pooled across everyone at the address, which is why it reads higher than typical individual earnings in the same area. Poverty reaches 30.8% 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 Chester city is valued at $85,400, 71.9% below the national figure and 56% below the $193,200 peer median, while median gross rent runs $1,080 a month, 23.2% below the national figure, or roughly $12,960 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 32.6% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is a stretch on median earnings. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 2.1×, 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. 40.9% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, a renter-majority market, so rent figures matter more here than the home-value line. Gross rent folds in the utilities a tenant pays separately, so it is closer to the real monthly outlay than a headline rent figure.

Chester city is the unusual combination of expensive to rent and cheap to buy: rent takes 32.6% of median income while homes cost only 2.1× it. Where that pattern shows up, the gap is normally down to down-payment and credit barriers rather than price.

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.