ZIP code 53206

ZIP 53206 is a mid-size town in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, with 20,219 residents counted in the Census American Community Survey 2019-2023 ACS 5-year estimates, which places it #104 of 783 ranked by population — larger than 86% of them. The median age here is 31.7 years against 39.1 nationally, a distinctly younger profile, typical of places with students, military posts or a fast-growing family population. 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 53206 earn a median of $28,995 a year, 63.1% 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 37.3% 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 53206 is valued at $70,800, 76.7% below the national figure, while median gross rent runs $998 a month, 29% below the national figure, or roughly $11,976 across a full year. A household on the local median income would put about 41.3% of gross pay toward that rent against the federal 30% cost-burden threshold, so renting here is severely stretched — a median-income renter clears the cost-burden line by a wide margin before utilities beyond the gross-rent definition. The home-price-to-income ratio works out to 2.4×, 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. 32.7% of occupied homes are owner-occupied versus 65% nationally, a renter-majority market, so rent figures matter more here than the home-value line. The rent line includes utilities paid by the tenant, a definition worth remembering when comparing it against a landlord's quoted rate.

ZIP 53206 is the unusual combination of expensive to rent and cheap to buy: rent takes 41.3% of median income while homes cost only 2.4× it. Where that pattern shows up, the gap is normally down to down-payment and credit barriers rather than price.

Every value on this page is published directly by the Census for this area — nothing is modelled or interpolated. 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 53206 is tabulated inside Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, one of 36 ZIP areas the Census publishes for that county and 783 across Wisconsin. 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 53206 can be handled by a post office in a neighbouring county even though the tabulation area is filed here.

Against its own county, 53206 reports a median household income of $28,995, 58% below the $68,482 county median, and 61% below the $73,420 typical WI ZIP. Owner-occupied homes are valued at a median of $70,800, 65% below the county figure and 67% below the statewide ZIP median. Rent is reported gross — the contract amount plus tenant-paid utilities — at $998 a month, which is why it reads higher than the advertised rent on a listing for the same unit.

A taxable purchase made inside 53206 carries 7.9% at the register, assembled from the Milwaukee jurisdiction stack: the Wisconsin 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 53206 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 53206 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.