Mellette, SD population, income and ZIP codes

Mellette city is a very small community in South Dakota, with 144 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #268 of 485 ranked by population — larger than 44% of them. The median age here is 49 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 Mellette city earn a median of $104,375 a year, 32.9% above the national figure of $78,538 and 59% above the $65,500 median for the 79 South Dakota 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 12.5% of residents here, above the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in Mellette city is valued at $151,400, 50.1% below the national figure and 21% below the $192,800 peer median, while median gross rent runs not published a month. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 1.5×, 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. 88.1% 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. Rent is reported gross — contract rent plus tenant-paid utilities — which is why it runs above the advertised price on a listing for the same unit.

Median income runs above the national figure while poverty also runs above it — a split distribution, not a uniformly comfortable place. Averages hide that; the two numbers together do not. With 144 residents, a handful of survey responses moves every median on this page. Compare Mellette city against its county rather than against national figures.

The Census withheld gross rent for Mellette city 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.