Santa Cruz, CA

Santa Cruz, CA is covered by 4 USPS ZIP codes serving a combined population of 97,900 according to Census ACS 5-Year Estimates. U.S. cities rarely map cleanly to a single ZIP — Santa Cruz splits its residents across 4 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 Santa Cruz, the median household income averages $123,740 and per-capita income averages $53,714. Poverty rate runs at 14.2% and unemployment at 8.0%. On housing, the average median home value is $994,800 with median rent of $2,303 per month, and 52.9% of occupied units are owner-occupied. These are arithmetic averages across the 4 ZIPs — not population-weighted — so small ZIPs influence the headline numbers the same as large ones.

Use this city view to compare ZIPs inside Santa Cruz 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 Santa Cruz 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.