Watauga, TN population, income and ZIP codes

Watauga city is a very small community in Tennessee, with 631 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #356 of 504 ranked by population — larger than 29% of them. The median age here is 44 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly older profile than the country as a whole. 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 Watauga city earn a median of $56,912 a year, 27.5% below the national figure of $78,538 and within a couple of points of 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 20.9% 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 Watauga city is valued at $128,800, 57.5% below the national figure and 33% below the $191,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs not published a month. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 2.3×, 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. 93.9% 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. Gross rent folds in the utilities a tenant pays separately, so it is closer to the real monthly outlay than a headline rent figure.

With 631 residents, a handful of survey responses moves every median on this page. Compare Watauga city against its county rather than against national figures.

The Census withheld gross rent for Watauga 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.