Cotton Plant, AR

ZIP code 72036 is assigned to Cotton Plant, AR, and falls within Woodruff 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 538 people live inside it.

At 5 residents per square mile spread over 116.056 square miles, 72036 reads as a rural area. It is a sparsely populated postal code, 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 $15,375, 72036 ranks among the lower-income postal codes, ahead of 0% 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 72036 costs well below the national median. A typical home is valued at $44,800 against a US median of $207,500, and median gross rent runs $537 a month. The split between owning and renting is fairly even at 53.2% 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 58.6% of housing units here. The median construction year is 1972, making the housing here from the later twentieth century. The vacancy rate of 36.2% is high, which in many places reflects seasonal or second-home use rather than abandonment.

The population skews considerably older than the national median, with a median age of 57.2 against 42 nationally. Households average just 1.91 people, and 52.5% consist of one person living alone — a signature of areas with a lot of studio and one-bedroom stock.

Getting to work takes 24.7 minutes on average one way. The dominant mode is drove alone at 83.1% of workers, while 14.6% walk. Commute patterns are one of the better proxies for how a place actually functions day to day.

Beyond addressing mail, 72036 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, 72036 offers a compact profile of Cotton Plant: 538 residents, a median household income of $15,375, 15.2% of adults holding a bachelor's degree or higher, and an unemployment rate of 17.2%. 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. 72036 may cover parts of several distinct areas, and a single neighbourhood in Cotton Plant 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.