Beaminster is mostly owned outright by people who have already done the hard part of their working lives. Two thirds own their homes. The typical resident is nearer sixty than fifty. A third of households are one person living alone. This is not a town people move to at thirty, it is a town people arrive at.
On tenure, the 2021 census, which is the source for the population figures throughout this answer, puts owner-occupation at about 66%. Private renting accounts for around 16% and social renting around 19%, which is a higher social share than most Dorset market towns carry and one of the few things keeping the place from becoming purely a market for equity.
The age profile is the defining fact. The median age is about 58. The share of residents aged 25 to 44, the years when people typically start families and change jobs, is around 15%. That is a town whose school run and whose bowls club are served by two fairly separate populations, with a noticeable gap between them.
Household income, modelled by the statistics authority for the financial year to March 2023, came to roughly £47,700 gross before tax. That describes incomes three years ago rather than today, and it is a middle-layer area average rather than a figure for any particular street. Set against the local housing, it explains why so much of the market moves between people who already own something.
Household composition follows from the age profile. About 35% of households are a single person, and around 24% are a single pensioner, that second figure being a subset of the first rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children make up around 11%, and lone-parent households around 9%. The town runs a decent primary and secondary school on a smaller share of families than most places its size, which says something about how seriously it takes them.
On qualifications, about 34% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and around 17% hold none at all, with full-time students at about 1%. Those are varied educational backgrounds rather than a uniform one: retired professionals and people who have worked the surrounding farms and trades their whole lives, sharing the same butcher.
Health self-reporting is reasonable, with about 77% describing their health as good or very good and around 5% as bad or very bad. Across the wider Dorset local authority rather than the town itself, smoking prevalence sits at about 10%, similar to England, and the preventable mortality rate of around 120 per 100,000 is better than the England benchmark. Those are county-level measures with a national comparison attached, not a verdict on anyone's household.
The population profile is the weakest part of Beaminster's case: an older, settled town with a thin band of working-age residents in the middle and a deprivation picture that is more mixed than the honey-coloured stone suggests. Nobody who lives here would dispute a word of that, and most of them chose it deliberately.