Clay ZIP codes — Clay County, Illinois

Clay County is a mid-size town in Illinois, with 13,173 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates. The median age here is 41.5 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly older 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 Clay County earn a median of $57,266 a year, 27.1% below the national figure of $78,538. Household income here is measured before tax and pooled across everyone at the address, which is why it reads higher than typical individual earnings in the same area. Poverty reaches 16.7% of residents here, above the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in Clay County is valued at $94,300, 68.9% below the national figure, while median gross rent runs $709 a month, 49.6% below the national figure, or roughly $8,508 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 14.9% 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 1.6×, 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. 80.7% 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.

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.