McDowell ZIP codes — McDowell County, West Virginia

McDowell County is a mid-size town in West Virginia, with 18,413 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates. The median age here is 43.6 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 McDowell County earn a median of $29,980 a year, 61.8% 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 30.9% of residents here, well above the 12.4% national rate, which is the single clearest signal in this dataset that median income here is carried by a narrow band of households.

The typical owner-occupied home in McDowell County is valued at $49,200, 83.8% below the national figure, while median gross rent runs $686 a month, 51.2% below the national figure, or roughly $8,232 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 27.5% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is within the standard affordability guideline. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 1.6×, 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. 75.7% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans toward owners. 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.