Settled households, mostly older, mostly owners. The median resident is fifty. The twenty-five to forty-four bracket is thin. A third of households are one person living alone. Bude's summer photographs misrepresent its electoral roll by roughly a generation, and the people who actually live here are not the ones in the pictures.
On tenure, about 63% of households own their home outright or with a mortgage, roughly 21% rent privately and around 14% rent from a social landlord. Every population figure on this page comes from the 2021 census. That ownership level is high for a coastal town, and the private rental share is lower than the holiday-let capacity would suggest, which tells you those two markets are not the same thing.
The age profile is the defining fact. The median age is 50, and only about 20% of residents are aged between twenty-five and forty-four. That is the bracket that fills schools, staffs shifts and buys first houses, and Bude has proportionally fewer of them than the town's own economy would like. It is not a retirement colony, but it is a town where the middle of the age range has thinned out.
Household income for the area was modelled at roughly £43,300 gross, before tax, in the financial year to March 2023. After tax, the equivalent net figure comes to about £35,300. Both describe that year rather than today, and both are modelled averages for the area rather than what any particular household banks. They are the numbers to hold in mind when local house prices come up in conversation.
Household make-up follows the age profile. About 34% of households are a single person, and roughly 20% are a pensioner living alone, that second figure being a subset of the first rather than an addition to it. Around 15% are couples with children and about 9% are lone-parent households. So a third of Bude's front doors open onto one person, and a fifth open onto one person who has retired. That shapes everything from how the buses get used to who is around on a Tuesday afternoon.
On qualifications, about 28% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and roughly 17% hold none at all. Full-time students make up about 1% of the population, which is what you would expect somewhere with no university anywhere near it. The spread is wide rather than concentrated at either end.
Health self-reports are solid: around 78% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 7% as bad or very bad. Two wider measures put the Cornwall local authority level with England as a whole. Smoking prevalence sits at about 12% of adults, classed as similar to the England figure, and the preventable mortality rate is also classed as similar. Those are county-level statistics covering everywhere from here to the Tamar, not Bude's own, and they describe a health system and a population at national average rather than anything specific to this town.
Bude is an ordinary, settled, moderately-off town rather than a prosperous one, and the demographic picture is the weaker part of what it offers. Older, quieter, with a thin working-age middle and incomes that sit some way behind the price of the houses those incomes are meant to buy.