Boscastle is lived in by people who own their houses outright and people who work the season that pays for the rest of the year. Seven in ten are owner-occupiers. The median resident is 56. Barely one in six is aged between 25 and 44. This is not a village people move to for a job. It is a village people move to once the job has stopped being the point.
On tenure, about 71% own their home, roughly 19% rent privately and around 10% rent socially. That is a settled ownership profile, and in a place where 85 premises on the rating list are holiday lets, the private rented sector is competing for stock with a business model that pays weekly.
The age profile is the single most defining number here. The median age is 56, and only about 15% of residents are between 25 and 44, the band that usually supplies a village with its young families, its bar staff and its plumbers. Boscastle has a working population. It does not have a large one.
Income is modest and older than it looks. Modelled gross household income for the area was around £41,150 in the financial year to March 2023, which is before tax and about £34,000 once tax comes off. It describes that year rather than this one, and given how much of the local economy runs on visitors, it will read differently to a salaried household than to one whose income arrives between April and September.
Household make-up, on the 2021 Census, which is the source for the population figures throughout this answer, is dominated by people living alone. About 33% of households are a single person, and roughly 18% of all households are a pensioner living alone, that group being a subset of the first rather than an addition to it. Couples with children account for about 8% and lone parents about 7%. Fewer than one household in six here contains a child of any age, which is the fact behind every conversation about the primary school roll.
On qualifications, around 31% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 14% hold none at all, with full-time students at roughly 1%. That is a wide spread for a small place, and it reflects two populations sharing a valley: people who retired into it, and people whose families have worked in and around it for generations.
Health self-reports are decent. About 80% describe their health as good or very good and around 6% as bad or very bad. Across the Cornwall council area, which is a much wider geography than this village, preventable mortality is similar to the England average and adult smoking, at about 12%, is also similar to England.
Boscastle's population is older, settled and financially modest rather than comfortable, which is a less flattering picture than the harbour photographs imply. Whether that reads as a weakness depends entirely on whether you were planning to be one of the people who retires here or one of the people who serves them.