In this post I’ll explain how I tabulated mean income by household from the 2010 American Community Survey by zip code, and also provide three data sets that will be useful for you in joining other ACS census tract level data you want to zip codes.

One piece of data I needed recently for a project was income by zip code. The US Census provides tons of data at various geographical scales, but you often have to dig through its web site and merge a bunch of tables together to get what you want. Unfortunately income by zip code appears to be one of these data sets.

The good news is you can get a proxy for household income, household median income, and per capita income by zip code . The bad news is that unless you want to pay for a data source from ESRI or some other vendor, you’ll have to do some legwork to get this data.

Why Doesn’t The Census Provide Income by Zip Code Data Tables?

Zip codes are created by the US Postal Service to help mail delivery. This is the main reason why the Census doesn’t use zip codes. (see this link to learn more). In contrast, the census views [Read more…]