Chelsea is home to a well-educated, mostly renting, largely grown-up population with a lot of people living alone. Six in ten households rent. Nearly half are one person. The typical resident is in their early forties. Children are thinner on the ground than the school gates suggest.
Chelsea has 22,967 residents in 11,021 households, and the 2021 census is the source for the population figures that follow. About 37% of households own their home, while about 44% rent privately and about 18% rent from a council or housing association. The postcard version of Chelsea leaves out nearly one household in five living in social housing, and so does most of what gets written about the place.
The typical resident is 43, and about 29% of people are aged between 25 and 44. That is a population past the flat-share years and well into its careers, and the age that the census finds here is the age at which people can afford to stay.
The Office for National Statistics models typical household income in Chelsea at about £89,500 before tax for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across the area's middle-sized statistical areas. Gross is the number that gets quoted at dinner, and the net figure is the one that meets a Chelsea rent.
About 47% of Chelsea's households are one person living alone, and about 13% are a single pensioner living alone, a group that sits inside that 47%. Couples with dependent children make up about 11% of households and lone parents about 7%. Nearly half the front doors in Chelsea open on to a single occupant, and the buzzer panels on its converted houses carry a lot of one-name labels.
About 63% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 10% have no qualifications and about 2% are full-time students. Chelsea is a place people move to after university, and almost nobody comes here to study.
About 88% of Chelsea's residents describe their health as good or very good. Taking Kensington and Chelsea as the measure, the borough's rate of deaths from preventable causes is better than England's, and its adult smoking rate, at about 8%, is similar to England's.
Chelsea's residents are comfortably off, highly educated and mostly settled into their working lives, with more people living alone and more renting than the district's reputation would lead anyone to guess.