ZIP code 40820

ZIP 40820 is a very small community in Harlan County, Kentucky, with 55 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #741 of 779 ranked by population — larger than 4% of them. The median age here is 68.2 years against 39.1 nationally, a markedly older profile that usually tracks retirees staying put and younger households leaving for work. At this population the ACS sample is small, so the margin of error around every dollar figure below is wide — treat the numbers as a band, not a point, and expect them to move between annual releases without the place itself changing.

Households in ZIP 40820 earn a median of $18,200 a year, 76.8% 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 54.5% 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 ZIP 40820 is valued at $22,000, 92.7% below the national figure, while median gross rent runs not published a month. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 1.2×, 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. 100% 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. 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 68.2 puts ZIP 40820 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. With 55 residents, a handful of survey responses moves every median on this page. Compare ZIP 40820 against its county rather than against national figures.

The Census withheld gross rent for ZIP 40820 because the sample was too thin to publish at this geography. Those values were suppressed at the source, not lost in our dataset, and we do not model a replacement. Everything else on this page comes straight from the ACS 2019-2023 ACS 5-year tables.

ZIP 40820 is tabulated inside Harlan County, Kentucky, one of 25 ZIP areas the Census publishes for that county and 779 across Kentucky. This is one of the smallest tabulated ZIP areas in the state, the kind of rural route where a single subdivision or farm cluster accounts for most addresses. County assignment on this page follows the largest share of the ZIP's land area, which matters where a delivery route crosses a county line: mail addressed to 40820 can be handled by a post office in a neighbouring county even though the tabulation area is filed here.

Against its own county, 40820 reports a median household income of $18,200, 50% below the $36,430 county median, and 66% below the $53,906 typical KY ZIP. Owner-occupied homes are valued at a median of $22,000, 66% below the county figure and 83% below the statewide ZIP median. Rent is reported gross — the contract amount plus tenant-paid utilities — at not published a month, which is why it reads higher than the advertised rent on a listing for the same unit.

Kentucky charges 6% statewide, and no local sales tax is layered on top, so the state rate is the full amount collected in 40820.

Everything above comes from the Census Bureau American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates for this ZIP Code Tabulation Area, with sales tax rates traced to the state revenue agency. Five-year estimates pool sixty months of responses, so they are stable enough to compare 40820 with its neighbours but always trail the current year, and any value the Census suppressed for sample size is shown as unpublished rather than filled in with a model.