The Oldest and Youngest Cities in America

The national median age is 38.9 years. That's the line where half the country is older and half is younger. Most places hover somewhere near it. But a handful of cities sit way out at the edges, and when you line up the oldest against the youngest, you're not looking at one trend with two ends. You're looking at two completely different machines, each cranking out a number from a different set of parts.

Let me show you what I mean.

The oldest places are built on purpose

Here are the seven oldest cities in the country by median age, all of them well past 70:

Desert Palms, California tops the list at 77.1. Then Leisure World, Maryland at 76.0, Laguna Woods, California at 74.9, Sun City West, Arizona at 74.8, The Villages, Florida at 74.1, Green Valley, Arizona at 73.6, and Sun City, Arizona at 72.7.

Notice the pattern. Arizona, Florida, California, with a Maryland outlier. These aren't old industrial towns where the young people left and the grandparents stayed. They're master-planned retirement communities, built from scratch in the Sun Belt and sold specifically to people who've finished working. A lot of them have age-restricted housing, which means you have to be 55 or older to buy in. When the entry rule is "no kids, no working-age adults," the median age doesn't drift upward over decades. It starts high and stays there.

The names give it away once you know what to look for. Sun City West (median age 74.8, population 27,425) and Sun City (median age 72.7, population 37,486) were literally branded as retirement destinations. Green Valley sits south of Tucson and runs on the same model.

The standout here is The Villages in Florida. Median age 74.1, which is striking on its own, but the population is 83,498. That's the part that gets me. Most of these retirement enclaves are small, a few thousand people, maybe twenty or thirty thousand. The Villages is the size of a real city, and almost everyone in it is past 70. You can build a small pocket of retirees almost anywhere. Building one with more than 83,000 people, and keeping the median that high, takes a deliberate, large-scale operation.

One honest caveat. Median age tells you the middle of the distribution, not the whole story. A community at 74.1 still has some younger residents, staff who live nearby, adult children visiting. But in age-restricted housing the floor is set by the rules, so these medians are unusually clean. They reflect a population that was assembled, not one that grew up in place.

The youngest places come from two different sources

Now flip to the other end. The youngest cities don't share a region. They split into two groups that have nothing to do with each other.

The first group is religious. Kiryas Joel, New York has a median age of 15.7. So does New Square, New York. Monsey sits at 16.1, Kaser at 17.1, and Lakewood, New Jersey at 17.5. These are Hasidic Jewish communities, and the reason their median ages are so low is birth rate. Large families are the norm, so children make up a huge share of the population. When half your city is under 16, that's not migration or a campus rule doing the work. That's families having a lot of kids and staying put.

Kiryas Joel has 47,147 people and Lakewood has 69,585, so these aren't tiny hamlets either. They're sizable communities where the demographics run on a fundamentally different logic than the rest of the country.

The second group is college towns, and here the "city" is basically a campus with a census line drawn around it. University, Mississippi comes in at 19.1, Clemson University, South Carolina at 19.2, and California Polytechnic State University, California at 19.2. The math here is simple. If the population is mostly undergraduates living in dorms, the median age is going to land right around 19, because that's how old undergraduates are. It's the opposite of the Sun Belt trick. Instead of an age floor, you've got an age ceiling, set by graduation rather than a deed restriction.

Same caveat applies, in reverse. A college-town median of 19 can swing depending on where the census boundary falls and whether faculty housing is included. The Hasidic communities are more stable, because the young population there is permanent, not turning over every four years.

Why the extremes don't cancel out

The old cities were designed to be old, with rules that keep working-age adults and children out. The young cities are young for two unrelated reasons, high birth rates in one set and a rotating student body in the other. The national median of 38.9 is what you get from everywhere in between, regular towns with a normal mix of ages.

So when you see a city way out at the edge, the median age isn't really telling you about aging. It's telling you what kind of place it is. A retirement development, a religious community, or a campus. Three different machines, one number.

If you want to see the full lists, we keep ranked pages for both ends: the oldest cities and the youngest cities. And if you want to put two specific places side by side and see how their age numbers stack up, the compare tool is the quickest way to do it.

Sources

Median age figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (2020-2024). Full ranked lists are on the oldest cities and youngest cities pages.