ZIP code 21794

ZIP 21794 is a small town in Howard County, Maryland, with 2,326 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #301 of 477 ranked by population — larger than 36% of them. The median age here is 42.2 years against 39.1 nationally, a slightly older profile than the country as a whole. 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 21794 earn a median of $223,833 a year, 185% above 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 2.8% of residents here, less than half the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in ZIP 21794 is valued at $977,200, 222.1% above the national figure, while median gross rent runs not published a month. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 4.4×, against roughly 3.9× nationally, so buying is harder here than in the average US market. 99.6% 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.

The Census withheld gross rent for ZIP 21794 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 21794 is tabulated inside Howard County, Maryland, one of 20 ZIP areas the Census publishes for that county and 477 across Maryland. Fewer than 2,500 people are counted here, so the ZIP behaves like a village delivery route rather than a neighbourhood. 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 21794 can be handled by a post office in a neighbouring county even though the tabulation area is filed here.

Against its own county, 21794 reports a median household income of $223,833, 26% above the $177,874 county median, and 115% above the $104,338 typical MD ZIP. Owner-occupied homes are valued at a median of $977,200, 45% above the county figure and 144% above 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.

Maryland charges 6% statewide, and no local sales tax is layered on top, so the state rate is the full amount collected in 21794.

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 21794 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.