A working population with a student layer on top and a harbour underneath it all. Six in ten own their homes. A quarter rent privately. Nearly a third of households are one person living alone. Falmouth is not a retirement coast and it is not a campus town, it is an ordinary Cornish working town that happens to have both bolted onto it.
On tenure, about 61% own, roughly 24% rent privately and about 14% rent socially. That private rental share is doing visible work in a town with a university and a summer economy, and it means a meaningful part of the housing stock is in the hands of people who do not live in it.
The age profile is middling rather than elderly. The median resident is 39, and about 22% of the population sits in the twenty-five to forty-four band. For a Cornish coastal town, where the cliché is a population quietly ageing towards the golf club, that is unexpectedly balanced.
Household income, modelled for the area, came to around £48,000 gross before tax in the financial year to March 2023. That is a figure describing that year rather than this one, and it is a household total rather than a wage, which matters in a town where two incomes are frequently what makes the arithmetic work.
Households here skew small. About 8% are lone-parent households, and the family share is lower than the school provision might lead you to expect.
Taking the full census picture, and every population figure on this page comes from the 2021 census, about 31% of households are a single person living alone, with single pensioners accounting for about 16% of all households as a subset of that rather than an addition to it. Couples with children make up about 15%. A town where nearly a third of front doors belong to one person explains a great deal about the flat stock, the pub trade and why so much of the housing is small.
On qualifications, about 37% hold a degree-level qualification and about 12% hold none, with full-time students making up around 6% of the population. That is a genuinely mixed picture rather than a graduate enclave, and it sits alongside the marine trades, the docks and the visitor economy without much friction.
Self-reported health is good: around 82% describe their health as good or very good, and about 5% as bad or very bad. At the wider Cornwall council level, which covers far more than this town, smoking prevalence and the preventable mortality rate both sit similar to England rather than above or below it.
One technical note worth knowing before reading any of the above too literally: about 863 people here live in communal establishments rather than private households, which in a town with halls of residence and care homes shifts the household-level shares slightly away from the raw population.
The people picture here is solidly middle-of-the-road: no concentrated affluence, no concentrated deprivation, a decent spread of ages and a town that mostly works for a living. The interesting part is not the averages but the fact that a harbour, a university and an ordinary Cornish town all fit inside them.