Cotter, Arkansas.
Typical home $249,185 (+0.5% in a year). Mountain Home, AR metro.
to buy the typical home at today's mortgage rate — +$670 (+105%) since Jan 2020.
- 1 year
- Up $1,304 +1%
- $247,881$249,185 since Sep 2025
- 5 years
- Up $39,026 +19%
- $210,159$249,185 since Sep 2021
Monthly payment to buy the typical home
Home value × that month's 30-year mortgage rate, 20% down, principal and interest. This is the line households feel: prices and rates compound each other.
- Cotter$1,308
- Arkansas$1,177
- United States$1,922
At the last five years' pace, a typical home here doubles in price every 20 years.
Typical home values in Cotter, AR rose 0.5% over the past year — slower than the nation's +1.2%.
Living in Cotter, Baxter County, Arkansas
Cotter is a city of 886 people in Baxter County. 71% of its homes are lived in by their owners and 29% are rented. Unemployment in Baxter County was 3.8% in August 2026, and the county had 1.7% more jobs in 2025 than the year before. The most people in Baxter County work in schools and health care, then shops.
Written by AI Claude Sonnet 5.5 wrote this on 24 October 2026 from the figures here, a list of nearby places and what it knows. It can be wrong or out of date.
What it’s like
The place. Cotter is a small city on the White River in the Arkansas Ozarks, and a good deal older than the country as a whole. Most homes are lived in by their owners, and incomes in Baxter County run below the national picture. January is the coldest month, with chilly days and freezing nights, while July brings hot afternoons, and rain and melted snow fall in fair measure through the year.
Work. Residents work mostly in schools, hospitals and social care, in shops, in manufacturing and in the building trades. Across Baxter County, the largest workplaces include Baxter Regional Medical Center, Mountain Home School District and Walmart. Commutes are short, and few people work from home.
Things to do. Bull Shoals Lake, a reservoir, is a short drive away, as are Bull Shoals Caverns, a tourist attraction, and Bull Shoals-White River State Park, a protected area. For a longer outing, Buffalo National River is another protected area a longer drive away.
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- 16%of adults have a degree
- 13%below the poverty line
- 16 mintypical commute
- 5%work from home
What people in Baxter County work in
Employed residents by industry, from the Census survey. Baxter County had 16,448 jobs in 2025, 1.7% more than the year before (Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Weather through the year
Coldest in January, with highs near 46° and lows near 28°; warmest in July, with highs near 90° and lows near 69°. About 41 inches of rain and melted snow a year.
Average daily high and low, 1991–2020, at the Mountain Home Baxter Airport weather station, 7 miles away (NOAA).
Largest workplaces in Baxter County
- Baxter Regional Medical CenterGeneral hospital1,427FTE
- Mountain Home School DistrictSchool district580FTE
- WalmartWarehouse clubs and supercenters502
- Danfoss Power Solutions IIHydraulic hoses, rubber or plastics, manufacturing329
- Baxter HealthcarePlastics film and unlaminated sheet manufacturing238
- Arkansas State University-Mountain HomeTwo-year college185
- Cotter School DistrictSchool district160FTE
- Arkansas Boats LLC Bass & Yar-CraftBoat yards153
Staff on average in 2025, as each workplace reported it to OSHA with its injury records: 26 workplaces with 20 or more staff, 4,531 people in all across the county; Cotter has two of its own. Hospitals come from their Medicare cost reports (CMS, 2023), school districts from the Common Core of Data (NCES, 2023–24) and colleges from IPEDS (NCES, 2023–24); FTE marks full-time equivalent staff. Not listed: many offices and banks, which need not report to OSHA; military bases, whose staff OPM withholds; and, in about half the states, city and county governments.
Natural hazards
- Ice stormsVery high
- Strong windVery high
- LightningVery high
- TornadoesVery high
- Winter weatherRelatively high
- Inland floodingRelatively high
FEMA’s National Risk Index (December 2025) rates the risk each natural hazard poses to the people, buildings and farms in Cotter’s census tracts, against the rest of the country; all of them together, relatively high. It is meant for planning, not a substitute for a local risk assessment or a flood map: FEMA’s index.
From the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 census and its American Community Survey (2020–2024 five-year estimates), and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A survey, so each figure has a margin of error, and figures it is not sure of are left out. More on Baxter County and the Mountain Home, AR metro.
Cotter home values
Zillow measures a city over its municipal boundary. Against the state and national figures, mid-tier homes, smoothed and seasonally adjusted.
- Cotter$249,185
- Arkansas$224,158
- United States$366,157
Sellers are cutting prices on about 1 in 7 Cotter listings — the market is roughly in balance.
When this market ran hot
Each cell is that month's year-on-year home-value growth. Read left to right, top row is the latest year — the 2021–22 band is the boom.
Market heat, inside the city limits
Share of listings with a price cut
The early-warning dial: sellers cut when buyers stop reaching. Rising cuts cool a market months before prices notice.
- Cotter14.66%
- United States26.90%
Homes for sale
Active for-sale inventory. More supply hands power to buyers.
- Cotter25
New listings per month
Sellers arriving at the market.
- Cotter6
Zip codes with a Cotter address
A different geography, not a breakdown. The figure above covers the municipality; these zips cover everywhere the Post Office calls Cotter — often including townships beyond the city limits. Both come straight from Zillow, and they are not expected to average out.