Petersburg, VA population, income and ZIP codes

Petersburg city is a small city in Virginia, with 33,365 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #34 of 688 ranked by population — larger than 95% of them. The median age here is 35.8 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly younger 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 Petersburg city earn a median of $50,741 a year, 35.4% below the national figure of $78,538 and 39% below the $82,986 median for the 383 Virginia 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 21.1% 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 Petersburg city is valued at $157,900, 48% below the national figure and 46% below the $291,300 peer median, while median gross rent runs $1,132 a month, 19.5% below the national figure, or roughly $13,584 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 26.8% 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. 38.3% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, a renter-majority market, so rent figures matter more here than the home-value line. The rent line includes utilities paid by the tenant, a definition worth remembering when comparing it against a landlord's quoted rate.

No figure on this page is estimated by us; each one comes straight from the published ACS tables for this area. 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.