Mostly homeowners in their late forties and beyond, doing comfortably. Seven in ten own. The typical resident is nearly fifty. A third of households are one person. Families with young children are a minority. Capel is where plenty of people make their last house move.
Ownership dominates. The 2021 Census, the source for every population figure here, puts about 69% of households as owner-occupiers, with about 14% renting privately and about 16% in social housing. That social share is larger than a Surrey village's price tags would suggest, which means Capel is less uniform than a drive down its lanes implies.
The age profile leans older. The median resident is 48, and people aged 25 to 44 make up about 22% of the population. The first-time buyer years are not where Capel's population sits; the people here mostly arrived some time ago and stayed.
Money is not the problem. The Office for National Statistics models median household income, gross and before tax, at about £73,000 for the financial year to March 2023. That figure is several years old and averaged across a wider statistical area, but it describes a place where two decent salaries are normal rather than aspirational.
Household make-up tells a quieter story than the family-home stock suggests. About 33% of households are one person living alone, and within that group about 17% of all households are single pensioners. Couples with dependent children make up about 17%, and lone parents about 7%. The four-bedroom houses are, in a fair number of cases, being kept warm for children who left years ago.
Qualifications are mixed rather than uniform. About 36% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 14% have no formal qualifications, and full-time students are about 1%. Graduates are not the majority, and the population covers a wider span of backgrounds than the house prices alone would suggest.
A small number of residents, 31 people, live in communal settings such as care homes rather than private households, too few to change how any of the shares above should be read.
Capel's population is middling in the best sense: comfortable, settled and ordinary, with no great distress and no pretence of anything grander.