Cirencester is home to middle-aged homeowners on comfortable incomes, with a large minority who rent living alongside them. Most households own. About four in ten rent. The typical resident is in their mid-forties. Living alone is more common than raising children. It is a comfortable town, and a more mixed one than its stone frontages suggest.
The population figures below come from the 2021 Census. About 57% of households own their home, 19% rent privately and 22% rent from a social landlord. So private tenants and social tenants are roughly equal groups, and together they make up a large share of the town. Plenty of the terraces behind the honey-stone centre are rented, and that rental stock is part of what keeps the town working.
The median age is 45, and about 23% of residents are between 25 and 44. The Royal Agricultural University, the oldest agricultural college in the English-speaking world, is on the edge of town, yet its students barely show in the town's figures. The people who set Cirencester's age are the ones who arrived, settled and stayed, more than the ones passing through for a degree.
The Office for National Statistics models typical household income at about £55,000 a year before tax for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across the town's three middle-layer areas. That is gross income for a whole household, before tax and before the mortgage on a Cotswold postcode takes its share.
Lone parents head about 9% of households.
The wider household picture explains why the town feels the way it does. About 36% of households are one person living alone, and that includes the 18% who are a pensioner on their own. Couples with children at home make up about 17%. A lot of the town's three-bed houses have one or two people in them, with the extra bedrooms kept for when the family visits.
About 34% of residents have a degree, 16% have no formal qualifications and 2% are full-time students. So the town covers both ends of the scale, with graduates and people who left school without qualifications in the same streets. The university is famous enough to be named in national newspapers, and still accounts for only about one resident in fifty.
Cirencester's people make it one of the town's stronger points. They are comfortable, more mixed than its reputation, and most are there for the long term.