Rule, TX population, income and ZIP codes

Rule town is a very small community in Texas, with 738 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #1136 of 1,863 ranked by population — larger than 39% of them. The median age here is 45.3 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 Rule town earn a median of $31,875 a year, 59.4% below the national figure of $78,538 and 51% 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 26.8% 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 Rule town is valued at $57,500, 81% below the national figure and 68% below the $179,100 peer median, while median gross rent runs $1,009 a month, 28.2% below the national figure, or roughly $12,108 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 38% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is a stretch on median earnings. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 1.8×, 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. 80.6% 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.

Rule town is the unusual combination of expensive to rent and cheap to buy: rent takes 38% of median income while homes cost only 1.8× it. Where that pattern shows up, the gap is normally down to down-payment and credit barriers rather than price. With 738 residents, a handful of survey responses moves every median on this page. Compare Rule town against its county rather than against national figures.

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.