Brookings ZIP codes — Brookings County, South Dakota

Brookings County is a small city in South Dakota, with 34,968 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates. The median age here is 28 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 Brookings County earn a median of $67,341 a year, 14.3% 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 12.8% of residents here, above the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in Brookings County is valued at $246,300, 18.8% below the national figure, while median gross rent runs $874 a month, 37.8% below the national figure, or roughly $10,488 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 3.7×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is easier here than in the average US market. 58.9% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans more heavily on renters. Gross rent folds in the utilities a tenant pays separately, so it is closer to the real monthly outlay than a headline rent figure.

A median age of 28 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.

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.