Columbia, SC

Browse our site as you search for Columbia, South Carolina! Columbia is a larger medium-sized city located in the state of South Carolina. With a population of 131,674 people and 80 constituent neighborhoods, Columbia is the largest community in South Carolina.

Columbia is a military town: the armed forces employs 10.43% of the workforce, making the military a major focus of life in the city. In the civilian sector, Education and Healthcare are important in the local economy and are the city’s largest civilian employers, employing 14.27% and 12.54% of the civilian workforce respectively.

Also of interest is that Columbia has more people living here who work in computers and math than 95% of the places in the US.

Columbia is made interesting by being both a reasonably big city and having a major college student population: students here will find that the city provides a lot of amenities, culture, and opportunities for them. Columbia is more than just a college town, however, though the thousands of students certainly are a major part of the character of the city, as well as a contributor to the local economy.

Not only is Columbia a city with many college students, but it also retains many recent graduates who are looking to start new careers, creating a very large population of people who are young, single, educated, and upwardly-mobile. That’s because Columbia is full of single people in their 20s and 30s and who have undergraduate or graduate degrees and are starting careers in professional occupations. This makes Columbia a pretty good place for young, educated career starters looking to find many people like themselves, with good opportunities for friendships, socializing, romance, and fun.

Compared to the rest of the country, citizens of Columbia spend much less time in their cars: on average, their commute to work is only 18.14 minutes. This also means that noise and pollution levels in the city are less than they would otherwise be.

Columbia is one of the most well-educated cities in the nation. 42.85% of adults in Columbia have at least a bachelor’s degree. Compare that to the average community in America, which has just 21.84% with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

The per capita income in Columbia in 2018 was $28,972, which is wealthy relative to South Carolina, and upper middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $115,888 for a family of four. However, Columbia contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.

Columbia is an extremely ethnically-diverse city. The people who call Columbia home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Columbia residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Columbia include German, English, Irish, African, and Italian.

The most common language spoken in Columbia is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Chinese.