West Lafayette, Indiana by the numbers

West Lafayette has about 45,000 residents, with Purdue students contributing substantially to the population counted within city limits. Age, income and housing figures need to be read with that context and their geographic boundaries in view.

Reading a university city's statistics

Citywide statistics include residents in different housing and life circumstances, including students. They describe the city as a whole and should not be treated as a profile or valuation of a particular neighborhood.

Two towns, one boundary

The Census counts people where they live most of the year, so a student in a residence hall or an apartment near campus is a West Lafayette resident. In the 2020 Census, 49.4 percent of the city was between 18 and 24 years old. Most of that age group is Purdue students, though not every student is that age and not everyone that age is a student.

The rest of the city is faculty, physicians, engineers, researchers and families who have been here for decades. That is the community most buyers join when they buy a house here.

The most educated community of its size in Indiana

Among West Lafayette adults 25 and older, 73.3 percent hold a bachelor's degree or higher. Nationally the figure is about 36 percent. In Indiana cities of comparable size it runs from 15 to 28 percent.

West Lafayette73.3%$350,000 Franklin27.8%$231,500 Shelbyville19.4%$174,700 Seymour18.1%$162,800 Crawfordsville15.2%$134,000

Bachelor's degree or higher, adults 25+, and median value of owner-occupied homes. U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020 to 2024 five-year estimates.

The table reports education and owner-occupied home values for different places. West Lafayette's home-value figure is $350,000. The figures alone do not establish that educational attainment causes a particular home value, or determine how an individual household buys or maintains a property.

How to read the income figure

West Lafayette's reported median household income is $34,891. About seventy percent of the city's households rent, and students are included in the citywide totals. Those facts require attention to the underlying measures; the overall median cannot identify the income of a particular neighborhood.

A campus that brings the world to a small city

Purdue's West Lafayette campus enrolls about 55,000 students, and by the Institute of International Education's Open Doors count it has the fourth-largest international enrollment of any public university in the country, more than 12,000 students from about 130 countries. The city shows it: 20.5 percent of residents were born outside the United States, and 24.2 percent speak a language other than English at home. Those are figures you would expect in a coastal metro, not a city of 45,000 in the Indiana corn belt, and they change what daily life feels like here.

The restaurants, the calendar of lectures and performances, the Big Ten weekends, and the simple fact that a research university of this scale never stops: this is the energy a world-class campus provides, and it is available to a family living on a quiet street ten minutes from it.

The schools

West Lafayette Community School Corporation is a small district, and it is a nationally ranked one. In the 2026 to 2027 U.S. News rankings, West Lafayette Jr./Sr. High School is second in Indiana and 170th of all public high schools in the United States. For a relocating family, a top-200 public high school inside city limits is a rarer thing than it sounds.

The stability under it

College towns are sometimes assumed to be one-employer economies. Greater Lafayette is not. Purdue and the Purdue Research Foundation anchor the west side, and the Research Park is home to more than 250 companies. Across the river, Subaru of Indiana Automotive employs more than 6,500 people at the only Subaru plant outside Japan, and Caterpillar's Large Engine Center employs about 1,900 and is in the middle of a $725 million expansion.

Cook Biotech, the biomaterials company that grew up in the Research Park, employs about 275. Health care adds two regional hospital systems. That is a diversified base, and it is the reason the owner-occupied market here has behaved like a stable professional city rather than a campus that empties every May.

The Census, university and employment records provide several views of West Lafayette. A housing decision still needs the relevant property, school assignment and daily routes. The next article examines the SK hynix project and its possible housing implications.