McMechen, WV population, income and ZIP codes

McMechen city is a small town in West Virginia, with 1,735 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #86 of 439 ranked by population — larger than 80% of them. The median age here is 33.4 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly younger profile than the country as a whole. 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 McMechen city earn a median of $42,863 a year, 45.4% below the national figure of $78,538 and 19% 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 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 McMechen city is valued at $89,500, 70.5% below the national figure and 30% below the $127,200 peer median, while median gross rent runs $562 a month, 60% below the national figure, or roughly $6,744 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 15.7% 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 2.1×, 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. 63.6% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans more heavily on renters. Gross rent folds in the utilities a tenant pays separately, so it is closer to the real monthly outlay than a headline rent figure.

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.