Bethel ZIP codes — Bethel Census Area, Alaska

Bethel Census Area is a mid-size town in Alaska, with 18,487 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates. The median age here is 28.7 years against 39.1 nationally, a distinctly younger profile, typical of places with students, military posts or a fast-growing family population. 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 Bethel Census Area earn a median of $70,616 a year, 10.1% below the national figure of $78,538. 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 24% 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 Bethel Census Area is valued at $120,600, 60.3% below the national figure, while median gross rent runs $1,454 a month, 3.4% above the national figure, or roughly $17,448 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 24.7% 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 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. 60.5% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans more heavily on renters. 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 28.7 means a large student or early-career population; income medians in places like this understate household resources, since many residents are supported from outside the address.

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.