Hale Center, TX population, income and ZIP codes

Hale Center city is a small town in Texas, with 1,705 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #798 of 1,863 ranked by population — larger than 57% of them. The median age here is 53.3 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 Hale Center city earn a median of $49,083 a year, 37.5% below the national figure of $78,538 and 24% below the $64,654 median for the 1,008 Texas 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 14.5% of residents here, above the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in Hale Center city is valued at $85,300, 71.9% below the national figure and 52% below the $179,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs $657 a month, 53.3% below the national figure, or roughly $7,884 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 16.1% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is cheap relative to what people here earn. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 1.7×, 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. 85.7% 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.

A median age of 53.3 puts Hale Center city 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.

Every value on this page is published directly by the Census for this area — nothing is modelled or interpolated. 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.