Monroe Center, Illinois.
Typical home $266,526 (+8.5% in a year). Rochelle, IL metro.
to buy the typical home at today's mortgage rate — +$793 (+131%) since Feb 2021.
- 1 year
- Up $20,931 +9%
- $245,595$266,526 since Sep 2025
- 5 years
- Up $73,854 +38%
- $192,672$266,526 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.
- Monroe Center$1,399
- Illinois$1,553
- United States$1,922
At the last five years' pace, a typical home here doubles in price every 11 years.
Typical home values in Monroe Center, IL rose 8.5% over the past year — faster than the nation's +1.2%.
Living in Monroe Center, Ogle County, Illinois
Monroe Center is a village of 411 people in Ogle County. Half its households earn more than $93,056 a year and half less, against $82,132 across Ogle County; 5% of its people live below the poverty line. 81% of its homes are lived in by their owners and 19% are rented. Unemployment in Ogle County was 3.6% in August 2026, and the county had 3.4% fewer jobs in 2025 than the year before. The most residents work in schools and health care, then manufacturing.
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 It can be wrong or out of date.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. Monroe Center is a very small village in Ogle County, Illinois, where most homes are lived in by their owners and incomes run above the county's. Fewer residents live below the poverty line than you might expect in a place this size, and a four-year degree is held by a minority of adults. Winters are cold and snowy, with January the coldest month, while July brings warm summer days, and rain and melted snow add up to a fair amount over the year.
Work. Residents work mostly in schools, hospitals and social care, with manufacturing, transport and warehousing, and shops also employing many. Commutes are long, and few people work from home. Across Ogle County, some of the largest workplaces are Rochelle Foods, Constellation and Rochelle Community Hospital.
Things to do. The Kishwaukee River is a short drive away, as is Stillman's Run Battle Site, a protected historic area. A longer drive leads to Anderson Japanese Gardens, a botanical garden, and to White Pines Forest State Park, a protected area of woodland.
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- 160households
- 24%of adults have a degree
- 5%below the poverty line
- 34 mintypical commute
- 8%work from home
What residents work in
Employed residents by industry, from the Census survey. Ogle County had 14,427 jobs in 2025, 3.4% fewer than the year before (Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Weather through the year
Coldest in January, with highs near 29° and lows near 14°; warmest in July, with highs near 84° and lows near 64°. About 37 inches of snow and 37 inches of rain and melted snow a year.
Average daily high and low, 1991–2020, at the Rockford Greater Rockford Airport weather station, 8 miles away (NOAA).
Largest workplaces in Ogle County
- Rochelle FoodsBacon, slab and sliced, made from purchased carcasses815
- ConstellationElectric power generation, nuclear715
- E D Etnyre & CoConstruction machinery manufacturing450
- Wheatland Tube Western TubeTube made from purchased iron or steel383
- Rochelle Community HospitalCritical access hospital347FTE
- Meridian CUSD 223School district286FTE
- Byron CUSD 226School district268FTE
- Del MonteLabeling services262
Staff on average in 2025, as each workplace reported it to OSHA with its injury records: 44 workplaces with 20 or more staff, 6,025 people in all across the county; Monroe Center has none of its own. Hospitals come from their Medicare cost reports (CMS, 2023) 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
- HailRelatively high
- Strong windRelatively high
- Cold wavesRelatively high
- TornadoesRelatively high
- DroughtRelatively moderate
- Ice stormsRelatively moderate
FEMA’s National Risk Index (December 2025) rates the risk each natural hazard poses to the people, buildings and farms in Monroe Center’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 Ogle County and the Rochelle, IL metro.
Monroe Center home values
Zillow measures a city over its municipal boundary. Against the state and national figures, mid-tier homes, smoothed and seasonally adjusted.
- Monroe Center$266,526
- Illinois$295,943
- 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.
Zip codes with a Monroe Center address
A different geography, not a breakdown. The figure above covers the municipality; these zips cover everywhere the Post Office calls Monroe Center — often including townships beyond the city limits. Both come straight from Zillow, and they are not expected to average out.