Owners, mostly, and older than the surf photography implies. Three in four households own their home. The median resident is fifty. Around a third of households are one person living alone. Braunton is not a retirement village and it is not a young coastal town: it is a settled place where people arrive with a deposit and then stop moving.
Tenure does most of the explaining. Census 2021, which is the source for every population figure here, puts owner-occupation at about 75%. Private renting accounts for about 16% and social renting about 8%. In a village where the beach is a ten-minute drive and the holiday economy is real, that ownership level is the thing keeping it a community rather than a seasonal set.
The age profile is the part buyers underestimate. The median resident is 50, and only about 19% of the population falls into the 25 to 44 band that most places treat as their working core. This is a village of people either well into a career or comfortably past one, which shapes everything from what the shops stock to how quickly a parish consultation fills a hall.
Household income runs at about £56,500 gross, before any tax comes off, or roughly £42,900 once it has. That is a modelled figure describing the financial year to March 2023 rather than what anyone is earning today, and it should be read as the shape of the place rather than this month's payslip. Comfortable, in other words, without being anywhere near wealthy.
Household make-up is where the village stops looking like the brochure. About 31% of households are a single person living alone, and about 18% are a pensioner living alone, that second figure being part of the first rather than an addition to it. Couples with children make up about 19% and lone parent households about 8%. The family-village framing that gets used to sell houses here describes a real but minority slice of who actually opens the door.
Qualifications sit at the balanced end. About 31% hold a degree-level qualification and about 16% hold none at all, with full-time students accounting for roughly 2%. That combination is typical of a place that mixes trades, farming, tourism and people who moved down with a laptop and a broadband contract, and it explains why the pub conversation covers both planning law and tide times.
For completeness, 86 residents live in communal establishments rather than private households, a number small enough that it changes none of the shares above.
Braunton's population is one of the steadier things about it: settled, comfortably off without being flash, and old enough to have made its mind up. Anyone hoping to be the youngest household on the street will find that ambition surprisingly easy to achieve.