Younger than the architecture suggests, and thinner on families than the schools imply. The typical resident is in their mid-thirties. A third of households are one person on their own. Two universities put a lot of people in halls and a lot of graduates in flats. Bath looks like a retirement city from the outside and behaves like a student-and-professional one from the inside, which is a mismatch nobody in the tourist office is in a hurry to correct.
On tenure, around 56% of homes are owner-occupied and around 27% are privately rented, with a further 17% in social housing. That private rental share is the number doing the most work here: it is what happens when a small city with a fixed housing stock hosts two universities and a substantial service economy.
The median resident is 35, and around 23% of the population sits in the 25 to 44 band. For a place whose housing stock is largely pre-1930, that is a strikingly young profile. The Georgian terraces are not full of people who remember the Georgians.
Household income runs at around £61,000 gross before tax, on modelled figures for the financial year to March 2023. That describes that year rather than today, and it is a household figure rather than an individual one. Net of tax, the same modelling puts household income at around £44,000.
Household make-up, from the 2021 census which is the source for every population figure here, tells the clearest version of the story. Around 32% of households are a single person living alone, and around 13% are a single pensioner living alone. That second figure is a subset of the first rather than something to add to it, so the great majority of Bath's solo households are working-age people, not retirees. Couples with dependent children make up around 17% of households, and lone-parent households around 8%. Family-shaped households are a minority here, which sits oddly beside a school system this strong.
On qualifications, around 44% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and around 10% hold none. Around 5% are full-time students. The graduate share is high and follows naturally from a city that employs heavily in education, health, publishing and professional services.
Health is good on the self-reported measures. Around 86% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and around 4% as bad or very bad. On the local authority figures for Bath and North East Somerset, benchmarked against England, smoking prevalence is better than the England average at around 7% of adults, and the preventable mortality rate is also better than the England average. Those are authority-wide figures covering a much larger area than the city, and they describe a population rather than explaining it.
One structural point worth holding. Around 7,400 people here live in communal establishments rather than private households, which for a city with two universities and a large care sector means halls of residence and care homes. That population sits outside the household-based shares above, and it is part of why the median age reads younger than the housing stock would predict.
The people here are one of Bath's genuine strengths: prosperous, healthy, well-qualified and considerably more mixed by age and household type than the heritage branding lets on. The city sells itself on stone and gets by on graduates.