Harrisburg, PA population, income and ZIP codes

Harrisburg city is a small city in Pennsylvania, with 50,092 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #10 of 2,002 ranked by population — larger than 99% of them. The median age here is 32.8 years against 39.1 nationally, a distinctly younger profile, typical of places with students, military posts or a fast-growing family population. 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 Harrisburg city earn a median of $47,783 a year, 39.2% below the national figure of $78,538 and 33% below the $71,118 median for the 982 Pennsylvania 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 29.1% 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 Harrisburg city is valued at $121,000, 60.1% below the national figure and 37% below the $193,200 peer median, while median gross rent runs $996 a month, 29.2% below the national figure, or roughly $11,952 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 25% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is within the standard affordability guideline. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 2.5×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is easier here than in the average US market. 36.5% 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.

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.