Shelby ZIP codes — Shelby County, Iowa

Shelby County is a mid-size town in Iowa, with 11,757 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates. The median age here is 45.1 years against 39.1 nationally, a markedly older profile that usually tracks retirees staying put and younger households leaving for work. 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 Shelby County earn a median of $67,690 a year, 13.8% below the national figure of $78,538. 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 8.5% of residents here, below the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in Shelby County is valued at $156,200, 48.5% below the national figure, while median gross rent runs $810 a month, 42.4% below the national figure, or roughly $9,720 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 14.4% 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 2.3×, 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. 75.8% 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.

All values below were released by the Census for this exact geography, with no gap-filling on our side. 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.