Polk ZIP codes — Polk County, Tennessee

Polk County is a mid-size town in Tennessee, with 17,702 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates. The median age here is 46.2 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 Polk County earn a median of $60,227 a year, 23.3% below 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 13.3% of residents here, above the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in Polk County is valued at $136,400, 55% below the national figure, while median gross rent runs $668 a month, 52.5% below the national figure, or roughly $8,016 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 13.3% 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 2.3×, 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. 84.1% 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. 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.