West Lafayette, IN

ZIP code 47906 is assigned to West Lafayette, IN, and falls within Tippecanoe 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 74,283 people live inside it.

At 556 residents per square mile spread over 133.576 square miles, 47906 reads as a small-town area. It is one of the more heavily populated postal codes in the country, 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 run below the national median. At $51,736, 47906 sits in the lower half, ahead of 18% 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 47906 costs close to the national median. A typical home is valued at $280,900 against a US median of $207,500, and median gross rent runs $1,157 a month. The split between owning and renting is fairly even at 44.5% 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 47.1% of housing units here. The median construction year is 1996, making the housing here from the later twentieth century.

The population skews notably young, with a median age of 22.3 against 42 nationally. The average household holds 2.83 people, and 42.3% are family households.

Getting to work takes 18.7 minutes on average one way. The dominant mode is drove alone at 60.0% of workers, while 13.9% walk, 13.1% work from home. Commute patterns are one of the better proxies for how a place actually functions day to day.

Beyond addressing mail, 47906 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, 47906 offers a compact profile of West Lafayette: 74,283 residents, a median household income of $51,736, 62.3% of adults holding a bachelor's degree or higher, and an unemployment rate of 3.1%. 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. 47906 may cover parts of several distinct areas, and a single neighbourhood in West Lafayette 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.