Fort Leonard Wood, MO

ZIP code 65473 is assigned to Fort Leonard Wood, MO, and falls within Pulaski County. Like every US postal code, it began as a mail-routing device rather than a geographic boundary — the US Postal Service groups delivery routes under a single code so carriers and sorting equipment can process mail efficiently. Today it also serves as a practical shorthand for the area itself: roughly 15,322 people live inside it.

At 145 residents per square mile spread over 105.496 square miles, 65473 reads as a rural area. It is a mid-sized postal code by population, and density shapes almost everything else on this page — how people get to work, whether they own or rent, and what housing costs.

Household earnings track close to the national picture. The median of $68,528 puts 65473 near the middle of the pack, ahead of 47% of them. The US median for comparison is $70,109. Bear in mind that median income describes the midpoint household, not the average — it is not pulled upward by a handful of very high earners the way a mean would be.

The building stock is dominated by detached single-family houses, which account for 62.5% of housing units here. The median construction year is 1991, making the housing here from the later twentieth century. The vacancy rate of 25.1% is high, which in many places reflects seasonal or second-home use rather than abandonment.

The population skews notably young, with a median age of 20.3 against 42 nationally. Households are relatively large at 8.42 people on average, with 71.8% classified as family households.

Getting to work takes 11.9 minutes on average one way. The dominant mode is walked at 54.8% of workers, while 54.8% walk, 15.5% work from home. Commute patterns are one of the better proxies for how a place actually functions day to day.

Beyond addressing mail, 65473 does a lot of quiet administrative work. Retailers use it to calculate shipping and sales tax at checkout. Insurers use it to set premiums, since risk profiles vary geographically. Employers and marketers use it to define service areas. Government agencies use it to route benefits and organise reporting. If you have ever been asked for a postal code by a form that clearly does not intend to send you anything, this is why.

For anyone weighing a move, 65473 offers a compact profile of Fort Leonard Wood: 15,322 residents, a median household income of $68,528, 29.3% of adults holding a bachelor's degree or higher, and an unemployment rate of 3.6%. A handful of figures like these answer more relocation questions than most neighbourhood guides do.

One caution worth repeating: a postal code is not a neighbourhood. 65473 may cover parts of several distinct areas, and a single neighbourhood in Fort Leonard Wood may be split across more than one code. Boundaries also shift as USPS adjusts delivery routes. Treat the figures here as describing a delivery area, which is what they actually measure.