Settled homeowners in their forties, mostly. Three in four own the place they live in. The typical resident is in early middle age. Households earn a comfortable, unflashy income. Cliffe is a village of mortgages being paid off, not of people passing through.
Ownership dominates. About 76% of households own their home, outright or with a mortgage, while about 11% rent privately and about 12% rent from a social landlord. Private renting is a sideline here, the sort of arrangement people describe as temporary and then renew twice.
The typical resident is 43, and about 24% of residents are aged 25 to 44. That is a village weighted towards the middle decades: people who arrived to raise children and have mostly stayed to see them through school, rather than a place where the young start out or the old retreat.
Modelled gross household income, before tax, averaged about £59,700 across the area in the financial year to March 2023. That figure describes that year, not this one. It fits the rest of the picture: two earners, two cars, a mortgage that is manageable rather than frightening, and a conservatory that was probably a family debate.
The village counts 2,531 residents across 984 households, and about 11% of those households are headed by a lone parent. The family shape is broader than the brochure version of village life, which tends to picture every household as two adults, two children and a labrador.
The rest of the household mix comes from the 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure here. About 22% of households are couples with dependent children, and about 22% are one person living alone. Within that single-person group, about 10% of all households are a pensioner living alone. So a family on one side of the fence and a long-standing resident on their own on the other is the ordinary street arrangement.
On qualifications, about 21% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 18% have none, and about 1% are full-time students. That is a practical mix of trades, office work and everything between, and the student share is small because there is nothing here built for students. Nobody moves to the edge of a marsh for the nightlife.
Health reads well at village level: about 83% of residents describe their health as good or very good. The wider Medway picture, measured for the whole council area against England, is more mixed. Medway's rate of deaths considered preventable is worse than the England average, and its smoking rate is similar to England's. Those are borough-wide figures and say nothing about the residents of Cliffe in particular.
Cliffe's population is middling in the most ordinary sense: settled, working and home-owning, neither well-heeled enclave nor struggling estate, and all the more predictable as neighbours for it.