Ashchurch is mostly working-age homeowners in their thirties and forties, with a solid minority who rent. About six in ten own their home. The typical resident is under forty. Household incomes are comfortable. Hardly anyone here is a student, and very few are retired and living alone.
At the 2021 Census, the source for every population figure on this page, 62% of Ashchurch households owned their home and 28% rented privately. The rest is mostly social renting, at 8%. With more than a quarter of homes let privately, there's a steady turnover of tenants on estates that look, from the road, as though everyone has a mortgage.
The typical resident is 39, and 30% of people are aged 25 to 44. That's the age of first jobs turning into careers, of nursery fees and of the first rear extension. It also fits housing that mostly went up in the last few decades.
The Office for National Statistics models gross household income, before tax, at about £58,700 for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across a wider statistical area that includes the village. That's enough for a family mortgage on a three-bedroom semi in Ashchurch. After tax and nursery fees, rather less is left over than the headline suggests.
Households are mixed. About 22% are couples with dependent children, 7% are lone parents, and 24% are one person living alone. About 6% of households are a single pensioner, and they're part of that 24%, not on top of it. More people live alone in Ashchurch than you'd guess from the cul-de-sacs, which look built for school runs.
About 36% of adults hold a degree-level qualification and 16% have no formal qualifications. Full-time students make up under 1% of residents. People arrive here after university, with a job, a deposit and usually a partner, and the village has nothing to offer the years in between.
Of 1,102 residents, 45 live communally, in institutions such as care homes, with everyone else in private households. The area has two care homes, so some older residents live in the village without showing up in its household figures. The real population is a little older and more varied than the household shares alone suggest.
Ashchurch's residents are one of its strengths: mostly in work, mostly in good health, settled enough to own and young enough to fill the primary school. People mostly arrive here at the stage of life when they start buying furniture.