Owners, families, and a lot of people living on their own. Six in ten households own the place they live in. A fifth rent from a social landlord. The median resident is thirty-nine. Andover is the national middle with a Hampshire postcode, and it has never pretended to be anything else.
Census 2021, the source for every population figure on this page, puts about 61% of households in owner occupation, about 16% renting privately and about 21% renting from a social landlord. That third figure is the one worth pausing on, because it is higher than the town's post-war estate map might lead you to guess, and the stock built during Andover's planned expansion is still tenanted rather than sold off into invisibility.
The median age is 39, and about 29% of residents are between 25 and 44. That combination describes a working town with children in it. Not a retirement coast, not a student city, and not one of those commuter villages where the average age climbs every year because nobody under fifty can get in.
Household income before tax was modelled at about £60,000 for the financial year to March 2023, with net income for the area modelled at about £42,000. Both describe that year rather than this one, and both are modelled across the area rather than gathered household by household, so treat them as the shape of local earnings and not as anybody's payslip.
About 28% of households are one person living alone. Around 11% of all households are a pensioner living alone, which sits inside that 28% rather than adding to it. About 22% are a couple with dependent children and about 11% are lone-parent households. The useful conclusion is that the family semi and the single-occupant flat are neighbours here rather than segregated into separate parts of town, which is what a place built quickly and to a plan tends to produce.
On qualifications, about 28% of residents hold something at degree level, about 16% hold no formal qualification at all, and about 2% are in full-time study. That is a spread rather than a type. Enough graduates to fill the office premises, plenty of people whose skills never came with a certificate, and a student population small enough that no landlord here has ever built a business model around September.
About 670 residents live in communal establishments rather than private households, which is small enough that the household figures describe very nearly everyone.
Who lives here reads as unremarkable in the most literal sense: a mixed, mortgaged, working population with no single group loud enough to set the tone. That is also the reason nobody has ever tried to sell Andover as a lifestyle, and the reason the people who live here tend to stay.