Drayton, SC population, income and ZIP codes

Drayton CDP is a small town in South Carolina, with 1,043 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #260 of 475 ranked by population — larger than 45% of them. The median age here is 45.8 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 Drayton CDP earn a median of $51,650 a year, 34.2% below the national figure of $78,538 and 3% below the $53,071 median for the 263 South Carolina 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 37.4% 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 Drayton CDP is valued at $82,500, 72.8% below the national figure and 53% below the $177,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs $1,331 a month, 5.3% below the national figure, or roughly $15,972 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 30.9% 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 1.6×, 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. 40.5% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, a renter-majority market, so rent figures matter more here than the home-value line. The rent line includes utilities paid by the tenant, a definition worth remembering when comparing it against a landlord's quoted rate.

Drayton CDP is the unusual combination of expensive to rent and cheap to buy: rent takes 30.9% of median income while homes cost only 1.6× it. Where that pattern shows up, the gap is normally down to down-payment and credit barriers rather than price.

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.