People who already own the house. Roughly seven in ten are owner-occupiers. The typical resident is nearer retirement than a first mortgage. A third of households are one person living on their own. This is not a town people arrive in at the start of something, and the numbers stop pretending otherwise about halfway down.
Tenure is the founding fact. About 72% of households own their home, around 15% rent from a social landlord and only about 12% rent privately. That last figure is the one that shapes daily life here: the private rental market is genuinely small, so anyone trying to rent their way into the town before committing will spend a while waiting for something to come up.
The age profile follows. The median resident is about 50, and only around 20% of the population falls in the 25 to 44 band that most towns rely on to fill their schools and their pubs. Bradford-on-Avon skews older, and it skews that way not by accident but because of what the houses cost and how rarely they change hands.
Modelled household income for the financial year to March 2023 came to roughly £61,000 before tax. That is a gross figure and it describes that year rather than this one, so it is a marker of the town's general standing rather than a number to hold against a mortgage application.
The census of 2021, which is the source for every population figure on this page, puts about 34% of households as a single person living alone. Around 20% of all households are a single pensioner, which is a subset of that first group rather than an addition to it. Couples with children make up about 18%, and lone parent households about 8%. The shape of that is a town of small households: quiet on a weekday, and not much competition for a parking space outside the school gates.
Education is heavily weighted to the top end. About 49% hold a degree-level qualification and around 11% hold none at all, with full-time students making up about 1% of the population. That is a professional town rather than a student one, and the absence of a student population is part of why it is as quiet as it is.
Health is good on the self-reported measure, with about 83% describing their health as good or very good and around 5% as bad or very bad. Across the Wiltshire local authority, which is a much wider geography than this town, preventable mortality sits better than the England benchmark and smoking rates are similar to England at about 8%. Those are county-level numbers with a national comparison attached, not this town's own.
Almost everyone here lives in an ordinary household. Of a population of 10,152, just 97 people live in communal establishments such as care homes, so the household shares above describe effectively the whole town rather than a slice of it.
The people are among the better things about this place: settled, employed, healthy, and largely staying put. The cost of all that stability is that the town refreshes itself slowly, and anyone arriving under forty is joining a place where most of the good decisions were made by people who got here two decades ago.