Methodology
ZIP Code Demographics is a single-source publication. Every figure on this site comes from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) 2020–2024 5-year estimates, retrieved in October 2026 from the Bureau's published table-based summary files on census.gov infrastructure (the www2.census.gov summary-file library for the ACS). We use the published files rather than any commercial aggregator, so every number can be traced to the Bureau's own release.
The Exact Tables We Use
Total population is table B01003; median age is B01002; race is B02001; Hispanic or Latino origin is B03003; educational attainment for the population 25 years and over is B15003; median household income is B19013; per-capita income is B19301; employment status for the population 16 years and over is B23025; households are B11001; median gross rent is B25064; and median home value for owner-occupied units is B25077. Derived figures are limited to arithmetic on those published cells: group shares of a published total, the bachelor's-degree-or-higher share (bachelor's, master's, professional and doctorate counts over the published age-25+ total), employment and unemployment rates from the published labor-force cells, average household size (population over households), population density (population over land area) and percentage comparisons with state and national values from the same release. Nothing is modeled, forecast or purchased.
Geography: ZCTAs, Counties and States
ZIP-level figures describe ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs) — in the summary files, geography 860Z200US followed by the five-digit code. A ZCTA is the Census Bureau's statistical area approximating the ZIP Code of the same number; it is not an exact USPS boundary. Each ZCTA is assigned to its main county and state using the Census Bureau's 2020 ZCTA-to-county relationship file, taking the county with the largest share of the ZCTA's land area; land area itself comes from the same relationship file. State and national benchmark figures are the Bureau's published state (040) and national (010) values from the identical tables and release, never a roll-up of ZIP data.
Suppression, Top Codes and Rounding
Where the Bureau suppresses a cell, the measure is omitted from the profile. Where a median is top-coded — median household income at $250,001 or median home value at $2,000,001 — we display it with a plus sign and say so. Counts are shown as published; percentages are computed from published counts and rounded to one decimal. Estimates carry margins of error published alongside them in the source tables; our learning library explains how to use them, and our profiles avoid ranking claims on gaps too small to survive them.
Corrections
If you find a figure that does not match the Bureau's published table for the stated vintage, contact us with the ZIP, the measure and the table number. Verified errors are corrected and the page's data re-pulled from the source file; we do not silently patch numbers from secondary sources.
Data: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey (ACS) 2020–2024 5-year estimates, retrieved October 2026. Source files and table numbers are listed on our methodology page; the underlying data is published at census.gov.