Fair Play, Missouri.
Typical home $265,337 (+5.5% in a year). Springfield, MO metro.
to buy the typical home at today's mortgage rate — +$763 (+121%) since Jan 2020.
- 1 year
- Up $13,719 +5%
- $251,618$265,337 since Sep 2025
- 5 years
- Up $76,680 +41%
- $188,657$265,337 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.
- Fair Play$1,393
- Missouri$1,393
- United States$1,922
At the last five years' pace, a typical home here doubles in price every 10 years.
Typical home values in Fair Play, MO rose 5.5% over the past year — faster than the nation's +1.2%.
Living in Fair Play, Polk County, Missouri
Fair Play is a city of 422 people in Polk County. Unemployment in Polk County was 4.1% in August 2026, and the county had 3.2% fewer jobs in 2025 than the year before. The most people in Polk County work in schools and health care, then shops.
Written by AI Claude Sonnet 5.5 wrote this on 23 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 It can be wrong or out of date.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. Fair Play is a very small Missouri city in Polk County, the kind of place where residents tend to know one another by sight. Homes here are priced well above what incomes across the county would suggest, so it is a quiet spot where buying often means stretching. Winters are cold, with January the chilliest month, and summers turn properly hot by July. Rain and melted snow add up to a fairly wet year.
Work. Residents work mostly in schools, hospitals and social care, with shops, manufacturing, and professional and business services also employing many. Across Polk County, the biggest workplaces include Citizens Memorial Hospital District, Southwest Baptist University and Bolivar R-I Schools. Few adults here hold a four-year degree, and the commute to work is a fairly typical one, with only a small number working from home. Unemployment across the county has eased a little from a year ago, though the county has fewer jobs than it did the year before.
Things to do. Barren Creek, a river, runs in or beside town. A short drive away are Stockton State Park, a protected area, and Walnut Creek, another river. Farther afield, a longer drive brings you to Pomme de Terre Lake, a reservoir, and to Fantastic Caverns, a tourist attraction.
Report a mistake
- 3%of adults have a degree
- 24 mintypical commute
- 6%work from home
What people in Polk County work in
Employed residents by industry, from the Census survey. Polk County had 9,202 jobs in 2025, 3.2% fewer than the year before (Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Weather through the year
Coldest in January, with highs near 43° and lows near 22°; warmest in July, with highs near 89° and lows near 67°. About 46 inches of rain and melted snow a year.
Average daily high and low, 1991–2020, at the Bolivar Northeast weather station, 10 miles away (NOAA).
Largest workplaces in Polk County
- Citizens Memorial Hospital DistrictGeneral hospital995FTE
- Southwest Baptist UniversityUniversity or college474
- Bolivar R-I SchoolsSchool district384FTE
- WalmartWarehouse clubs and supercenters365
- White River Marine GroupBoat yards215
- BD Health Ag 1Agriculture production or harvesting crews205
- Citizens Memorial Health Care FoundationNursing homes123
- Citizens Memorial Healthcare FacilityNursing homes123
Staff on average in 2025, as each workplace reported it to OSHA with its injury records: 17 workplaces with 20 or more staff, 1,737 people in all across the county; Fair Play has one of its own. Hospitals come from their Medicare cost reports (CMS, 2023), colleges from IPEDS (NCES, 2023–24) and school districts from the Common Core of Data (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 stormsRelatively high
- LightningRelatively high
- Strong windRelatively high
- Winter weatherRelatively high
- Heat wavesRelatively high
- TornadoesRelatively high
FEMA’s National Risk Index (December 2025) rates the risk each natural hazard poses to the people, buildings and farms in Fair Play’s census tracts, against the rest of the country; all of them together, relatively moderate. 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 Polk County and the Springfield, MO metro.
Fair Play home values
Zillow measures a city over its municipal boundary. Against the state and national figures, mid-tier homes, smoothed and seasonally adjusted.
- Fair Play$265,337
- Missouri$265,387
- United States$366,157
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
Homes for sale
Active for-sale inventory. More supply hands power to buyers.
- Fair Play6
Zip codes with a Fair Play address
A different geography, not a breakdown. The figure above covers the municipality; these zips cover everywhere the Post Office calls Fair Play — often including townships beyond the city limits. Both come straight from Zillow, and they are not expected to average out.
Zip codes in Fair Play
| Zip activate to sort by Zip | Place activate to sort by Place | Population sorted descending, activate to sort ascending | Rent activate to sort by Rent | Home value activate to sort by Home value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 65649 | Fair Play | 1,932 | — | $285,012 |
| 65601 | Aldrich | 572 | — | $290,674 |