People who have finished moving. Most households own their homes. The median age sits past fifty. A third of homes contain one person, and a large slice of those are pensioners living alone. This is a town people arrive in rather than pass through, and the profile reflects a place where the big life decisions have already been made.
On tenure, the 2021 Census puts owner-occupation at about 71%, with roughly 17% renting privately and about 11% renting socially. That is a settled ownership town by any measure. It also means the rental market here is a modest slice of the stock rather than a parallel economy, so anyone planning to rent before buying will find the choice narrower than the town's size suggests.
The age picture is the single most defining number about this place. The median age is 53, and only about 18% of residents fall in the twenty-five to forty-four band that most towns rely on to fill their offices and their nurseries. Burnham-on-Sea has plenty of people, and comparatively few of them are at the stage of life that generates school runs and second mortgages.
Income runs at about £43,500 a year for the typical household, gross and before tax, modelled for the financial year to March 2023. That is a figure describing a period now some way behind us rather than what anyone is earning today, and it is a household figure rather than an individual one, so it frequently covers two pensions, or one salary and one part-time job, rather than a single career wage.
Household make-up follows the age profile with almost mechanical consistency. About 33% of households are one person, and roughly 20% of all households are a single pensioner, which is a subset of that first figure rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children make up about 14%, and lone-parent households about 9%. All of those come from the 2021 Census, as does every population figure on this page. What the mix produces on the ground is a town with quiet weekday mornings and a lot of front doors that open for one person.
On qualifications, about 23% hold a degree-level qualification and about 22% hold none at all, which is a genuinely even split rather than a town leaning one way. Full-time students account for around 1%, which is what happens when the nearest higher education is somebody else's problem. That mix says something about the local labour market and nothing whatsoever about the people, and anyone using education shares to draw conclusions about house prices or school results is doing arithmetic the data does not support.
Health self-reporting has about 75% describing their health as good or very good, with around 8% reporting bad or very bad health, which is a reasonable showing for a population with this age profile. At the wider Somerset level, and this is a council-area figure with an England benchmark rather than the town's own, preventable mortality comes out better than England overall and smoking prevalence at about 11% is similar to England. Those are area-level indicators and they describe a health system's catchment, not a street.
One technical note worth having: of the roughly 17,800 people counted here, about 360 live in communal establishments such as care homes rather than private households. That is a small enough share not to distort the household figures above, but it is a real part of who lives in this town and worth knowing before reading the single-person household share as purely a story about flats.
The profile here sits below average on the prosperity measures, and the honest description is a settled, older, owner-occupied town living on moderate incomes rather than an affluent one. Nobody arriving should expect the demographics to change much, because the people who chose this place chose it precisely for what it already is.