Fort Defiance, AZ

ZIP code 86504 is assigned to Fort Defiance, AZ, and falls within Apache 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 5,905 people live inside it.

At 29 residents per square mile spread over 201.621 square miles, 86504 reads as a rural area. It is a smaller 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 are well below the national median. At $47,227, 86504 ranks among the lower-income postal codes, ahead of 13% 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.

Housing in 86504 costs well below the national median. A typical home is valued at $45,600 against a US median of $207,500, and median gross rent runs $725 a month. The split between owning and renting is fairly even at 66.3% owner-occupied, which tends to indicate a mix of housing types rather than one dominant form.

The building stock is dominated by detached single-family houses, which account for 74.6% of housing units here. The median construction year is 1980, making the housing here from the later twentieth century. The vacancy rate of 22.6% is high, which in many places reflects seasonal or second-home use rather than abandonment.

The population skews younger than the country as a whole, with a median age of 33.8 against 42 nationally. Households are relatively large at 3.63 people on average, with 73.3% classified as family households.

Getting to work takes 22.4 minutes on average one way. The dominant mode is drove alone at 87.8% of workers.

Beyond addressing mail, 86504 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, 86504 offers a compact profile of Fort Defiance: 5,905 residents, a median household income of $47,227, 12.3% of adults holding a bachelor's degree or higher, and an unemployment rate of 13.8%. 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. 86504 may cover parts of several distinct areas, and a single neighbourhood in Fort Defiance 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.