ZIP code 56517

ZIP 56517 is a very small community in Polk County, Minnesota, with 256 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #795 of 880 ranked by population — larger than 9% of them. The median age here is 42.5 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 56517 earn a median of $106,250 a year, 35.3% above 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 6.6% of residents here, below the 12.4% national rate.

The typical owner-occupied home in ZIP 56517 is valued at $144,700, 52.3% below the national figure, while median gross rent runs not published a month. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 1.4×, 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. 80.9% 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.

With 256 residents, a handful of survey responses moves every median on this page. Compare ZIP 56517 against its county rather than against national figures.

The Census withheld gross rent for ZIP 56517 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 56517 is tabulated inside Polk County, Minnesota, one of 16 ZIP areas the Census publishes for that county and 880 across Minnesota. 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 56517 can be handled by a post office in a neighbouring county even though the tabulation area is filed here.

Against its own county, 56517 reports a median household income of $106,250, 70% above the $62,337 county median, and 41% above the $75,417 typical MN ZIP. Owner-occupied homes are valued at a median of $144,700, 18% below the county figure and 35% 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.

Minnesota charges 6.875% statewide, and local governments overlapping 56517 may add county, city or special-district levies on top. We publish the state floor for this ZIP rather than guessing a combined figure, because ZIP boundaries and taxing-district boundaries were drawn for different purposes and do not line up.

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 56517 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.