Lake Charles, LA

Lake Charles, LA is covered by 5 USPS ZIP codes serving a combined population of 124,276 according to Census ACS 5-Year Estimates. U.S. cities rarely map cleanly to a single ZIP - Lake Charles splits its residents across 5 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 Lake Charles, the median household income averages $67,650 and per-capita income averages $35,839. Poverty rate runs at 19.9% and unemployment at 7.0%. On housing, the average median home value is $210,140 with median rent of $1,153 per month, and 69.1% of occupied units are owner-occupied. These are arithmetic averages across the 5 ZIPs - not population-weighted, so small ZIPs influence the headline numbers the same as large ones.

Use this city view to compare ZIPs inside Lake Charles 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 Lake Charles 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.