Griffin, Georgia
Seal of Georgia
Griffin · Spalding County, Georgia
Population 23,650 (est. 2026: ~24,000)
Source: Census ACS 2023 · ACS 2023 + 0.47% annual growth projection

Griffin, Georgia

Spalding County, Georgia · Population 23,478

Griffin sits at the center of Spalding County, about 45 miles south of Atlanta on US-19/41. It's the county seat and by far the largest city in a county of 67,306 — meaning Griffin functions as the regional hub for commerce, healthcare, schools, and government across a largely rural stretch of the Georgia Piedmont. The city has deep textile and industrial roots, a majority-Black population, and a median age of 33.2 that skews noticeably younger than the state norm. It's not a suburb. It's its own city, with its own economy, and it operates accordingly.

People & Demographics

Griffin's 23,485 residents make it the dominant population center in Spalding County. The racial makeup is majority Black at 12,245 residents (roughly 52%), with 9,189 white residents, 329 Asian, and 1,096 Hispanic or Latino residents. The city is younger than Georgia as a whole — a median age of 33.2 reflects a community with a significant number of children and working-age adults. There are 5,875 children under 18, spread across 9,868 households. The average household size of 2.35 is modest, and family households account for 6,085 of the total. Of 10,580 total housing units, 712 sit vacant — a vacancy rate around 6.7%.

Economy & Employment

The labor force numbers 10,743 with 587 unemployed — an unemployment rate near 5.5%. Median household income sits at $42,047, and per capita income comes in at $26,016. Both figures trail the Georgia state medians by a meaningful margin, reflecting Griffin's working-class economic profile. Poverty is a real pressure point: 5,906 residents fall below the poverty line, representing roughly 25% of the population. Manufacturing, healthcare, and retail drive local employment, as they have for generations. The Georgia Experiment Station, a long-running University of Georgia agricultural research facility located in Griffin, adds an institutional employment dimension that's easy to overlook.

Housing

Griffin's housing market is affordable by Georgia standards. The median home value is $185,500, and median gross rent runs $1,026 per month. Renters dominate: 6,129 occupied units are renter-occupied versus 3,739 owner-occupied, meaning roughly 62% of households rent. That's a high renter share and signals a market where ownership remains out of reach for a significant portion of residents despite relatively low home values. The combination of low incomes and substantial poverty rates explains the gap. For buyers coming from metro Atlanta, $185,500 buys considerably more space than anything close to the city.

Schools

Griffin and Spalding County operate a large, unified school system with 15 campuses listed in NCES data. At the high school level, Griffin High School enrolls 1,498 students in grades 9–12, and Spalding High School serves 1,252 students in the same grades. Middle school options include Rehoboth Road Middle (615 students), Cowan Road Middle (543), Kennedy Road Middle (477), and Carver Road Middle (471). Elementary schools span the county: Futral Road Elementary (590), Cowan Road Elementary (566), Orrs Elementary (534), Moreland Road Elementary (433), Atkinson Elementary (431), Crescent Road Elementary (418), Moore Elementary (386), Jackson Road Elementary (363), and Jordan Hill Road Elementary (356). Total K–12 enrollment across these campuses exceeds 8,400 students. Southern Crescent Technical College maintains a campus in Griffin, providing workforce and technical education for the region.

Getting Around

Griffin is car country. Of 9,799 total workers, 8,550 drive alone to work — that's 87%. Another 514 carpool. Public transit use registers at just 1 worker, which effectively means no functional transit system. Sixty-two residents walk to work, and 471 work from home. With aggregate travel time across all workers totaling 217,735 minutes, the average one-way commute works out to roughly 22 minutes — modest by metro standards but notable given the small city size, suggesting a meaningful share of workers commute out toward Atlanta or other employment centers in the region.

Healthcare

WellStar Spalding Medical Center serves Griffin and the surrounding county as the primary hospital facility. The Griffin-Spalding County area falls within WellStar's broader regional network, which connects to larger facilities in Atlanta when higher-level care is required. For a full directory of licensed healthcare providers practicing in Griffin, the CMS NPI Registry provides a searchable listing at npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov.

Library

The Griffin-Spalding County Library serves the city and county, reachable at 770-412-4770. It functions as the public library hub for the entire Spalding County system.

Parks & Recreation

Griffin sits within driving range of several National Park Service sites. The Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area and Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park are both accessible to the north toward Atlanta. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park in Atlanta, with its visitor center approximately 35.5 miles away, draws significant regional visitation. Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park near Macon lies about 47.7 miles to the southeast, offering a different kind of historical and cultural draw. Locally, Griffin's position in the Georgia Piedmont gives residents access to state parks and rural recreation across a broad area.

Natural Hazards

Spalding County has accumulated a long record of FEMA disaster declarations, and the pattern is instructive for anyone moving to the area. Severe winter storms have struck repeatedly — declarations issued in January 2000, February 2014, March 2014, and January 2026. Tornadoes and straight-line winds hit hard in April 2011 and again in January 2023. Hurricane remnants have reached this far inland: Opal (1995), Frances (2004), Irma (2017, two separate declarations), and Helene (2024) all generated federal disaster declarations in Spalding County. The county also participated in Hurricane Katrina evacuation support in 2005 and received COVID-19 emergency declarations in March 2020. Winter ice storms and wind events are the most frequent threats; hurricane remnants are a real but secondary risk even 250 miles from the coast.

Government & Municipal Code

Griffin's municipal code is published through Municode and accessible at library.municode.com/ga/east-griffin-cdp-georgia. The code does not include a locally adopted building code per available data.

Weather

National Weather Service forecasts for Griffin are available at forecast.weather.gov. Active weather alerts for the area appear at alerts.weather.gov. The nearest official weather observation station is EXPERIMENT, located 2.6 miles from the city center — this is the University of Georgia's Griffin campus weather station, which has produced one of the longer continuous climate records in the Georgia Piedmont.

References

The law belongs to the people. Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, 590 U.S. (2020)