La Follette, TN population, income and ZIP codes

La Follette city is a mid-size town in Tennessee, with 7,308 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #84 of 504 ranked by population — larger than 83% of them. The median age here is 40.1 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly older 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 La Follette city earn a median of $34,678 a year, 55.8% below the national figure of $78,538 and 38% below the $55,988 median for the 307 Tennessee 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 30.7% 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 La Follette city is valued at $106,000, 65.1% below the national figure and 45% below the $191,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs $690 a month, 50.9% below the national figure, or roughly $8,280 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 23.9% 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 3.1×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is easier here than in the average US market. 40% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, a renter-majority market, so rent figures matter more here than the home-value line. 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.

All values below were released by the Census for this exact geography, with no gap-filling on our side. 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.