Benson is mostly young families who own their homes, with a sizeable group of people living in institutional accommodation as well. Six in ten households own. The typical resident is in their late thirties. Four in ten adults have a degree. Benson is a working village with children in it, and a retirement village it is not.
About 62% of Benson households own their home and about 28% rent privately, with the remaining households mostly in social housing. A private rental market that size means a steady turnover of newcomers on one-year leases alongside the owners who arrived decades ago, and both groups end up on the same school run.
The median age in Benson is 37, and about 32% of residents are between 25 and 44. Those are the mortgage and nursery years, and Benson has plenty of people in them. For a village with a lock and a twelfth-century name, it is surprisingly short of pensioners.
The Office for National Statistics models household income across the surrounding area at about £74,000 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That is gross income, counted before tax, national insurance and the nursery fees, and it describes a household three years ago, not one today. It is comfortable money, and spread across two working adults and a couple of children it goes less far than it sounds.
The census is the source for every population figure on this page, and at the 2021 count about 28% of Benson households were couples with dependent children and about 7% were lone parents. About 25% were people living alone, and about 13% were pensioners living alone, who are included in that 25% and not additional to it. Nearly three in ten households have children at home, which explains why the school gate is the busiest place in Benson every weekday at quarter past three.
About 42% of adults hold a degree and about 9% have no formal qualifications. Full-time students make up about 1%, which suits a village without a college and without rented rooms for students. The mix is professional more than academic. People here mostly live off what their degrees qualified them for, and few are still studying.
Of Benson's 5,847 residents, 389 live in communal accommodation, places like care homes, halls and service quarters, and not in private households. With a care home in the area and the village's second primary school named after the Royal Air Force station next door, that population is part of village life and not a statistical quirk. It also nudges the census shares, because those 389 people count towards the population but not towards the 2,229 households. Benson is one of the few villages where a fair number of the residents report to someone in uniform.
Benson's population is one of its real strengths: young enough to keep the schools full, well qualified, mostly owner-occupiers and doing comfortably. The village works because most of the people living in it intend to stay for a good while.