Faringdon is lived in by people in the middle of everything: mid-career, mid-mortgage, mid-school-run. About six in ten own their home. The typical resident is forty. Roughly one household in five is a couple bringing up children. It is not a starter town and not a retirement one. Most of it is somewhere in the thick of it.
Ownership is the norm but not the whole story. About 62% of households own their home, around 17% rent privately and about 19% rent from a council or housing association. That social-rented share is larger than the private one, which is not what the market-town branding tends to mention. Faringdon has always had more working households than the postcards suggest.
The age profile sits squarely in the middle. Every population figure on this page comes from the 2021 Census, and on that count the median resident is 40, with about 28% aged between 25 and 44. That is a town with plenty of people in the years of buying houses, changing jobs and discovering what nursery fees cost, balanced by enough older residents to keep the town's clubs and committees running.
Money is comfortable rather than conspicuous. The Office for National Statistics' modelled estimate puts average household income at about £66,000 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That is gross income, a few years old, and an average across the area rather than any street's own figure. It describes a town where two decent incomes buy a decent semi, and where nobody needs to talk about it.
Households come in the usual shapes. About 30% of households are one person living alone, and within that group about 12% of all households are a pensioner living alone. Couples with dependent children make up about 22%, and lone parents about 9%. The rest are couples without children at home, families with grown-up children still in the spare room, and the other arrangements that never fit a census box neatly.
Education splits two ways. About 40% of residents aged 16 and over hold a degree-level qualification, while about 14% hold no formal qualifications. Full-time students make up about 2%, which is what you get in a town with no university and one secondary school: teenagers leave for higher education and mostly come back later with a partner and a mortgage application.
Almost everyone lives in an ordinary household. Of about 8,600 residents, 89 live in communal settings such as care homes, too few to shift any of the shares above.
The people are one of Faringdon's strengths: settled, working and comfortably off, with enough variety in age and income to stop the place turning into a single type.