Fairlea, WV population, income and ZIP codes

Fairlea CDP is a small town in West Virginia, with 1,266 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #124 of 439 ranked by population — larger than 71% of them. The median age here is 60.1 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 Fairlea CDP earn a median of $23,197 a year, 70.5% below the national figure of $78,538 and 56% below the $52,974 median for the 148 West Virginia 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 30.7% 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 Fairlea CDP is valued at not published, while median gross rent runs $873 a month, 37.9% below the national figure, or roughly $10,476 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 45.2% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is severely stretched — a median-income renter clears the cost-burden line by a wide margin before utilities beyond the gross-rent definition. 65.7% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans toward owners. 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.

A median age of 60.1 puts Fairlea CDP 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.

The Census withheld home value for Fairlea CDP 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.