Bay City, TX population, income and ZIP codes

Bay City city is a mid-size town in Texas, with 17,816 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #176 of 1,863 ranked by population — larger than 90% of them. The median age here is 32.8 years against 39.1 nationally, a distinctly younger profile, typical of places with students, military posts or a fast-growing family population. 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 Bay City city earn a median of $51,898 a year, 33.9% below the national figure of $78,538 and 20% below the $64,654 median for the 1,008 Texas cities we cover. This figure covers the household, not the worker: two people on ordinary wages at one address outrank a single professional in the same table. Poverty reaches 26.7% 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 Bay City city is valued at $149,800, 50.6% below the national figure and 16% below the $179,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs $997 a month, 29.1% below the national figure, or roughly $11,964 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 23.1% 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 2.9×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is easier here than in the average US market. 50.5% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans more heavily on renters. 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.