Chard is lived in mostly by people who were already living here. Six in ten own their homes. A third of households are one person on their own. The typical resident is in their forties. Somerset in the property pages means money that retired out of a city, and this is the other Somerset, the one that was getting on with it long before the property pages noticed the county existed.
About 61% own their homes and about 18% rent privately, with another 20% renting from a social landlord. That last figure is larger than the market-town picture usually allows for, and it is the main reason the town is mixed rather than sorted.
The typical resident is 44, and about 24% are aged between 25 and 44. This is neither a retirement town nor a young one. It is the profile of a place people arrive in, stay in, and quietly get older in.
Modelled gross household income for the area came to about £41,000 in the financial year to March 2023, of which roughly £33,000 survived tax. Both figures describe that year rather than this one, and both are measured before a mortgage, a rent payment or a heating bill has taken its cut.
The 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure on this page, records about 33% of households as one person living alone. About 17% of all households are a single pensioner, and that group sits inside the first rather than alongside it, so the two must never be stacked. Couples with children account for about 17% of households and lone-parent households for about 10%. A town where a third of front doors open onto one person has a particular texture to its weekday afternoons, and a particular kind of neighbour who notices things.
About 20% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 22% hold no formal qualification at all, with full-time students at about 1%. That is the profile of a town that has made its living from making things rather than from advising other people about making things.
Health reported at the census was good or very good for about 79% of residents, with about 6% reporting bad or very bad health. On the wider measures published for the Somerset council area, which covers far more ground than Chard alone, preventable mortality sits better than the England benchmark, and adult smoking, at about 11%, is similar to it.
Of the town's residents, 117 live in communal establishments rather than private households, which is too small a group to bend any of the shares above.
Who lives here is the least complicated answer this town gives: settled owners, a great many people living alone, and incomes that stretch to a comfortable life in Chard and nowhere more expensive. On the mix of income, qualifications and health that this measure is built from, the town sits below the county's better-off corners, and unlike the brochures for the rest of Somerset it has never once claimed otherwise.