Basingstoke is working-age households with a mortgage and not much spare time. Six in ten own their home. The typical resident is in their late thirties. About one household in five rents from a social landlord. It's middle England with a staff pass.
The 2021 Census is the source for every figure on this page, and it covers about 119,000 people in about 49,000 households. About 60% of households own their home, about 17% rent privately and about 21% rent from a council or housing association. That social-rented share is higher than the estate agents' photos of new-build cul-de-sacs would suggest, and it's a legacy of the large estates built when the town expanded. Owners are the majority, but renters make up a big part of the town, not a footnote.
The typical resident is 38, and about 31% of people are aged 25 to 44. That's a town full of people in the stretch of life between the first mortgage and the last school run. Nobody moved here to retire quietly. They moved here to work.
Household income averaged about £66,000 a year before tax in the financial year to March 2023. That's a modelled gross figure for households, which often means two earners, not a single salary, and it describes a few years ago rather than today's pay. Enough to run a semi and a car or two, and not quite enough to stop checking the energy bill.
Households are mixed. About 22% are couples with dependent children, and about 10% are lone parents. About 28% of households are one person living alone, and within that, about 10% of all households are a pensioner living alone. The town was built for young families and still has plenty of them, but more than a quarter of front doors open onto a single occupant.
About 34% of adults hold a degree-level qualification and about 15% have no formal qualifications. Only about 2% are full-time students, which fits a town with a sixth-form college and a technical college but no university campus since Winchester's closed in 2011. Graduates and non-graduates live on the same estates, share the same bus routes and park on the same verges.
A small number of residents live in communal settings such as care homes rather than private households, too few to change how the other figures read.
Basingstoke's population sits squarely in the middle: neither wealthy nor struggling, neither young nor old. It's a town of people in their working years, and it looks like one.