Des Moines, IA

Des Moines, IA is covered by 12 USPS ZIP codes serving a combined population of 212,318 according to Census ACS 5-Year Estimates. U.S. cities rarely map cleanly to a single ZIP — Des Moines splits its residents across 12 delivery areas, each with its own demographic and housing profile. The table below lists every ZIP by population, so you can see which neighborhoods carry the weight of the city total and which are smaller pockets of the same municipal boundary.

Aggregated across every ZIP in Des Moines, the median household income averages $67,584 and per-capita income averages $40,283. Poverty rate runs at 16.1% and unemployment at 5.8%. On housing, the average median home value is $218,100 with median rent of $1,075 per month, and 59.2% of occupied units are owner-occupied. These are arithmetic averages across the 12 ZIPs — not population-weighted — so small ZIPs influence the headline numbers the same as large ones.

Use this city view to compare ZIPs inside Des Moines against each other rather than hunting for a single "city average." The Affordability Dashboard linked below combines these Census inputs with HUD Fair Market Rents, FBI crime data, and Department of Labor childcare costs into a graded scorecard for Des Moines as a whole, while individual ZIP pages show fine-grained household income, housing profile, education attainment, commute time, and nearby-ZIP benchmarks. Every field on this page is sourced directly from U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2023 5-Year Estimates — no estimates, no proprietary scoring, no editorial adjustment.