People who work here, which in Cornwall is rarer than the brochures let on. The typical resident is in their early forties. Just over half own their homes, and the rest divide almost evenly between private landlords and social housing. Close to a third of households are one person living alone. This is a town that houses people rather than one that hosts them.
On tenure, about 56% of households are owner-occupiers, roughly 22% rent from a private landlord and around 21% rent socially. That social rented share is the detail worth sitting with. Plenty of Cornish towns have a housing profile shaped by holiday demand and second ownership; this one has a housing profile shaped by people needing somewhere to live all year. It is the difference between a town with a season and a town with a Tuesday.
The age profile does the same job of puncturing the county stereotype. The median resident is 41, and about 26% of the population is aged between 25 and 44. Whatever mental image the word Cornwall produces, it probably involves more retirement bungalows and fewer people leaving for a shift at half past seven.
Income sits modestly. The Office for National Statistics models median household income for the area at roughly £43,200 gross, before tax, and that figure describes the financial year to March 2023 rather than today. After tax it comes out at about £34,500. Those are modelled averages across a wide area rather than anybody's payslip, and they are best used to understand the shape of the town, not to benchmark yourself against your neighbours.
Household make-up, from the 2021 Census, which is the source for the population figures throughout this answer, tilts towards small households. About 31% are single people living alone, and single pensioners account for around 14% of all households as a subset of that group rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children make up roughly 18%, and lone-parent households about 11%. A town where nearly a third of front doors have one person behind them is a town with a lot of one-bedroom and two-bedroom demand, which is not what the family-market listings suggest.
On qualifications, about 23% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, roughly 20% hold none, and around 1% are in full-time study. The student figure is small because the further education provision here serves people who mostly live at home rather than a campus that imports them. The mix reads as a working town with a professional layer rather than a graduate town with a service layer, which is a description of what people do, not a ranking of them.
Health, self-reported, comes out ordinary. About 78% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and roughly 7% as bad or very bad. Looking wider, at the Cornwall local authority level rather than the town, adult smoking sits at about 12% and is classified as similar to England, and preventable mortality is also classified as similar to England. Those are county-level benchmarks and they attach to the whole authority, not to any street in Bodmin.
For completeness, 190 people live in communal establishments rather than private households. That is small enough that it changes none of the shares above.
The people here are the least glamorous thing about the place and the most honest. Nothing in this profile flatters the Cornwall the tourist board sells, and nothing in it is trying to; it is a working population on ordinary money in a town that gets on with it.