ZIP code 48204

ZIP 48204 is a mid-size town in Wayne County, Michigan, with 19,723 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #199 of 992 ranked by population — larger than 80% of them. The median age here is 41 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 ZIP 48204 earn a median of $32,875 a year, 58.1% 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 36.4% 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 48204 is valued at $53,600, 82.3% below the national figure, while median gross rent runs $970 a month, 31% below the national figure, or roughly $11,640 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 35.4% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is a stretch on median earnings. 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. 52.5% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, so the market leans more heavily on renters. Rent is reported gross — contract rent plus tenant-paid utilities — which is why it runs above the advertised price on a listing for the same unit.

ZIP 48204 is the unusual combination of expensive to rent and cheap to buy: rent takes 35.4% of median income while homes cost only 1.6× it. Where that pattern shows up, the gap is normally down to down-payment and credit barriers rather than price.

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.

ZIP 48204 is tabulated inside Wayne County, Michigan, one of 69 ZIP areas the Census publishes for that county and 992 across Michigan. This is a mid-sized suburban ZIP inside a county that is split across many delivery areas. 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 48204 can be handled by a post office in a neighbouring county even though the tabulation area is filed here.

Against its own county, 48204 reports a median household income of $32,875, 43% below the $57,577 county median, and 51% below the $66,726 typical MI ZIP. Owner-occupied homes are valued at a median of $53,600, 66% below the county figure and 70% below the statewide ZIP median. Rent is reported gross — the contract amount plus tenant-paid utilities — at $970 a month, which is why it reads higher than the advertised rent on a listing for the same unit.

A taxable purchase made inside 48204 carries 6% at the register, assembled from the Detroit jurisdiction stack: the Michigan state rate plus every county, municipal and special district levy that reaches this address. Because those district boundaries were drawn for schools, transit and hospital funding rather than for mail delivery, two addresses inside 48204 can legitimately fall under different totals — the rate shown here is the one that applies to the dominant jurisdiction.

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 48204 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.