Brentwood is a town of homeowners in their forties with good jobs and full calendars. Seven in ten own their home. The typical resident is just past 40. Household incomes are comfortable. More than a third have a degree, and the rest mostly have a mortgage to show for it.
At the 2021 census, which is where every population figure here comes from, 69% of households owned their home, 18% rented privately and 13% rented from a council or housing association. The private rental market is small, and it shows. The renters are mostly in the flats near the stations, while the semis further out have been in the same hands for years.
The median age is 41, and 28% of residents are aged 25 to 44. That is a town in the middle of things, with a lot of people at the stage of life where the school run and the mortgage payment arrive in the same week.
Typical household income in Brentwood came out at about £73,000 before tax in the financial year to March 2023, a modelled estimate from the Office for National Statistics. It is a comfortable figure, enough for the semi and the train fare. It is also gross and a few years old, and mortgage lenders look at take-home pay.
Couples with dependent children make up 22% of households, and lone parents 11%. Brentwood is a family town, though not overwhelmingly so, with the rest made up of older couples, single people and sharers.
Single-person households account for 31%, and 13% of all households are pensioners living alone, who form part of that single-person group. The bungalows in Hutton and the flats in the town centre account for a good share of them. A town that empties onto the trains in the morning still has a sizeable group of people who stayed home long before remote working made it fashionable.
At the census, 37% of residents held a degree-level qualification and 14% had no qualifications at all. Full-time students made up about 1%. There is no university here, so the 18-year-olds pack up their bedrooms in September and come back in December with a bag of washing.
Brentwood is a settled, comfortable town of families and working professionals. It has fewer young renters than many places and more people who arrived for the schools and decided to stay.