Chatham belongs to working households in their thirties. Six in ten own their home. About one in five rent privately. A quarter hold a degree, and a fifth have no formal qualifications. Nobody moves here to be seen. They move here to get a house.
Everything on this page comes from the 2021 census unless it says otherwise. Chatham has about 83,750 residents in about 33,160 households. About 61% of households own their home, about 22% rent privately and about 16% rent from a council or housing association. Owners are the majority, but there are enough renters that every street has a few, and the letting boards appear often enough for everyone to know what the market's doing.
The median resident is 37, and about 28% of people are aged 25 to 44. Those are the years of mortgages and nursery runs, and the town's shape follows them: terraces bought by first-time buyers who stayed, and suburbs bought by people who needed a third bedroom. The estate-agent phrase "popular with young professionals" is closer to the truth here than usual. It's just that most of the professions involve a van or a shift pattern.
The Office for National Statistics models median household income at about £57,000 a year before tax, and about £41,000 after housing costs and tax come out. Both figures cover the financial year to March 2023, so they describe the town a few years ago, not today. That's two-earner money, not one-earner money, and the house prices are set accordingly.
Among households, about 22% are couples with children, about 13% are lone parents with children and about 28% are one person living alone. About 11% are pensioners living alone, a subset of that 28%, not an extra group. This is a family town with a lot of single occupants in it: the flats and small terraces near the centre house the singles, and the three-beds up the hill house everyone else.
About 25% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 20% have no formal qualifications. Full-time students make up about 2%, so there's no student quarter, no term-time exodus and no landlord converting a semi into six bedsits for the university crowd. The spread reflects a town built on skilled manual trades that has since gained an office economy.
About 82% of residents describe their health as good or very good. Across the Medway council area, which is broader than Chatham, preventable deaths run at a rate that Public Health England-style comparisons rate worse than England's, while smoking, at about 11%, is similar to the national level. Those are council-wide figures measured against an England benchmark, and they describe the local authority, not the people on any one street.
Only 857 people live in communal settings such as care homes and halls, too few to shift any of the shares above.
Chatham is a modest, hard-working town where most people own a house and many are stretching to keep it. It isn't a wealthy address and doesn't pretend to be. Buyers who want a neighbourhood that looks affluent will find it elsewhere, and pay for it.