Kiawah Island, SC population, income and ZIP codes

Kiawah Island town is a small town in South Carolina, with 2,196 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #186 of 475 ranked by population — larger than 60% of them. The median age here is 66 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 Kiawah Island town earn a median of $236,607 a year, 201.3% above the national figure of $78,538 and 346% above 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 2.7% of residents here, less than half the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in Kiawah Island town is valued at $1,723,200, 468% above the national figure and 873% above the $177,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs not published a month. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 7.3×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is out of reach on local earnings alone and the ownership market leans on outside income, equity or dual high earners. 98.1% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, an owner-dominated market where rental listings are scarce and rent medians rest on a thin sample. The rent line includes utilities paid by the tenant, a definition worth remembering when comparing it against a landlord's quoted rate.

Home values sit at 7.3× median household income, far past the 3.9× national mark, so ownership costs here are set by something other than local wages — second homes, retirees with equity, or commuters earning elsewhere. A median age of 66 puts Kiawah Island town well into retirement-weighted territory, which pulls median household income down even where household wealth is high, because retirement draws are counted differently from wages.

The Census withheld gross rent for Kiawah Island town 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.