Settled professionals in their middle years, most of them owners. Four households in five own their home. The typical resident is in their late forties. Nearly half the adults have a degree. Ashtead is where people come to stay once their careers have paid off.
At the 2021 Census, which is the source for every population figure on this page, about 80% of Ashtead's 6,122 households owned their home. About 10% rented privately and another 10% rented from a social landlord. With so few homes rented privately, Ashtead has no real churn of tenants, and households that arrive tend to stay put.
The median age is 47, and only about 19% of residents are aged 25 to 44, the years when most people buy a first home and start a family. That age band is thin because it is the hardest to afford here. People who grew up in Ashtead in the 1980s tend to reappear around forty with children of their own and a deposit made from selling a house somewhere else.
The Office for National Statistics modelled typical household income across the area at about £76,000 before tax for the financial year to March 2023, which comes to about £53,000 once tax is taken off. The before-tax figure is the bigger one, but a mortgage is paid from the after-tax one.
Couples with dependent children make up about 26% of households, and single-person households are also about 26%. In the same village, the school run and the lunch club share the pavements in roughly equal numbers. Lone-parent households are about 7%.
About 16% of all households are a pensioner living alone, and they are counted within the single-person share, not on top of it. Much of Ashtead's older population lives alone in a family-sized house, and the village's quieter streets reflect that. The other large group is couples with children at school.
About 48% of adults hold a degree or equivalent, about 11% have no formal qualifications, and only about 2% are full-time students. The professional pattern is an old one. By 1914 the new houses along Leatherhead Road and Woodfield Road were filling with professionals who took the train to London. Their successors still work in the same professions, though more of them now do it from home.
Only 190 residents live in care homes and other communal settings out of 15,416 people in all, too few to change any of the shares above.
Ashtead has one of the most comfortable populations anywhere, made up mostly of people who arrived, settled and stayed. The age profile is the gap, because the same prices that keep the village comfortable keep most people under forty out.