Cholsey is mostly home-owning families in the middle of life, with comfortable incomes and degrees. Seven in ten own their home. The typical resident is in their mid-forties. Nearly half have a degree. Where people rent, they are slightly more likely to have a social landlord than a private one.
Every figure here comes from the 2021 census unless it says otherwise, and covers the Cholsey area, which takes in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell and South Moreton as well as the village. About 73% of households own their home. About 11% rent privately and about 14% rent from a council or housing association. In most commuter villages private renting is the bigger of the two, and in Cholsey it is the other way round. A buyer is competing mainly with other owner-occupiers, not with landlords building portfolios.
The median resident is 45, and about 22% of people are aged 25 to 44. That is a village with plenty of people in their forties and fifties and a thinner layer of young adults behind them. The 25-to-34s who grew up here mostly have to come back later, and with more money.
The Office for National Statistics models median household income across the area at about £65,000 a year before tax in the financial year to March 2023. It is a modelled figure for a group of neighbourhoods and a few years old, and it describes the typical household, which is not every household. An area with this many families with children and this many homeowners in their forties is where an income like that tends to be found.
About 25% of households are couples with dependent children and about 8% are lone parents. About 23% are one person living alone, and about 12% of all households are a single pensioner, who are counted within that 23%. Families with children outnumber people living alone, and the children are why the primary schools and the school run fill up.
About 48% of residents have a degree-level qualification and about 11% have no formal qualifications. Full-time students make up about 1%, because there is no college here to bring them in. At 18 the young leave for university and work, and the village mostly sees them again at Christmas.
The people are one of Cholsey's real strengths: a stable, well-off community of owners and families, the sort that stays put and keeps the village running.