Arenac ZIP codes — Arenac County, Michigan

Arenac County is a mid-size town in Michigan, with 15,054 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates. The median age here is 50.1 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 Arenac County earn a median of $56,989 a year, 27.4% 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 13.4% of residents here, above the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in Arenac County is valued at $129,000, 57.5% below the national figure, while median gross rent runs $741 a month, 47.3% below the national figure, or roughly $8,892 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 15.6% 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. 85.7% 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.

A median age of 50.1 puts Arenac County well into retirement-weighted territory, which pulls median household income down even where household wealth is high, because retirement draws are counted differently from wages.

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.