The people who wanted Drayton and bought Cosham. About six in ten households own their home, outright or through a mortgage. The median age is 39. The typical household earns around £58,500 a year. A working-age population on a working-age budget.
For tenure, the split runs around six in ten owners and four in ten renters. Roughly 16 in a hundred households rent privately, and another 21 in a hundred rent from the council or a housing association, which is a higher social-rental share than the national norm and largely reflects Paulsgrove and Wymering inside the same ward. Owner-occupier still dominates the headline at around 61 per cent. This is not a transient renter postcode; it is the kind of place where people buy and then stay, even when the rest of the city is cycling through tenants.
The age profile is squarely working-age. The median resident is 39, which sits a year or two below the England median rather than above it. Around 28 in a hundred residents fall into the prime working-age band of 25 to 44, which is a normal share for a southern English suburb with affordable family housing. Around one in eight households are headed by a single pensioner, so there is a retired layer in the mix, but the area is not a retirement enclave. Twos and threes coming and going to work and school is the dominant texture.
The typical household income lands at around £58,500 a year, which sits close to the national average for a household with two earners. For a £304,000 typical sale price, that is a multiple of a little over five, which is the standard southern-English stretch rather than the impossible London one. The income mix supports the housing stock: terraces and post-war semis at the median sale price are buyable on a decent dual income, and the flats lower down the price range are buyable on a single one.
The household make-up is mixed rather than concentrated. About 27 in a hundred households are single-person, around 20 in a hundred are couples with children, and around 14 in a hundred are lone-parent households. Roughly 27 in a hundred residents hold a degree, and about 20 in a hundred have no qualifications at all, which puts the area in the middle of the educational distribution for the city. Unemployment runs at around 2.6 per cent, which is low. Full-time students sit at around 2.6 per cent too, which is unsurprising for a suburb without a university campus. The composite indices for deprivation put Cosham in the middle of the national distribution, with the local figure improving slightly between 2019 and 2025.
A working suburb of working people, leaning toward families and away from extremes. Not poor enough to be a problem, not posh enough to be a destination. Cosham is what the country looks like when it gets on with the week.