New Albany has claimed the title of Central Ohio’s wealthiest ZIP code, with average adjusted gross incomes hitting $775,100, even as the city’s own median household income sits at $238,250. Meanwhile, just a few miles south, Downtown Columbus tells a much stranger story: a median household income of roughly $74,000 alongside an average adjusted gross income that tops $1.07 million, the widest wealth gap of any ZIP code in the region.
The figures come from a new ranking of Central Ohio’s top 36 wealth-concentrated ZIP codes published by Columbus Business First, which built its 2026 Wealth Index from a weighted calculation combining per capita income, population density, median age, and median home value. The list draws on 2024 American Community Survey five-year estimates, the most current data available, and covers Franklin, Delaware, Licking, Union, Fairfield, Madison, and Pickaway counties. Its parent research effort, American City Business Journals, evaluated almost 33,200 ZIP codes nationwide to compile the index, according to the outlet.
To land on the list, a ZIP code had to clear the metro’s average per capita income threshold, which the U.S. Census Bureau put at $45,178, while also keeping its poverty rate under 15%. Columbus Business First excluded ZIP codes with fewer than 250 residents as of 2024 Census estimates and stripped out any with less than 0.5 square miles of land area, a methodology researcher Grace McCormick says adjusts for land area so that oversized rural ZIP codes do not skew the results. The final list contains 35 postal codes ranked out of the metro’s top 36.
Delaware County’s Suburban Money Machine
The New Albany numbers do not exist in a vacuum. New Albany sits inside Delaware County, which the U.S. Census Bureau ranks as Ohio’s wealthiest county, with a median household income of $133,540 in 2024 estimates that previously put it 35th nationwide among all U.S. counties. The county’s high-performing public school districts and open land have steadily pulled affluent buyers north out of Franklin County…