Buchanan ZIP codes — Buchanan County, Iowa

Buchanan County is a mid-size town in Iowa, with 20,645 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates. The median age here is 39.9 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 Buchanan County earn a median of $78,430 a year, essentially level with the national figure of $78,538. 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 7% of residents here, below the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in Buchanan County is valued at $171,400, 43.5% below the national figure, while median gross rent runs $802 a month, 43% below the national figure, or roughly $9,624 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 12.3% 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 2.2×, 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. 81.1% 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. 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.

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.