Portales is also a college town, where lots of students live while attending area colleges. Because of the high percentage of people living in Portales enrolled in college, Portales has a number of services, amenities and opportunities geared towards the needs and activities of students.
Compared to the rest of the country, citizens of Portales spend much less time in their cars: on average, their commute to work is only 16.11 minutes. This also means that noise and pollution levels in the city are less than they would otherwise be.
Being a small city, Portales does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.
The citizens of Portales are slightly better educated than the national average of 21.84% for all cities and towns, with 24.52% of adults in Portales having a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Portales in 2022 was $22,236, which is lower middle income relative to New Mexico, and low income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $88,944 for a family of four. However, Portales contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
Portales is an extremely ethnically-diverse city. The people who call Portales home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Portales residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Portales also has a sizeable Hispanic population (people of Hispanic origin can be of any race). People of Hispanic or Latino origin account for 44.32% of the city’s residents. Important ancestries of people in Portales include German, English, Irish, European, and Italian.
The most common language spoken in Portales is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Italian.
