Farnham belongs to people who have already made the money and would now like some peace. About two in three households own their home. Around half the adults have a degree. The typical resident is in their forties. Farnham isn't where careers start. It's where they come to sit down.
The Census 2021 figures, which are the source for every population number here, put owner-occupiers at about 67% of households. Private renters make up around 18%, and social renters about 13%. That's a settled town, not a transient one: people buy here, stay, and eventually leave in the removal van they arrived in, bound for somewhere with a smaller garden and a bigger view.
The median age is 43, and people aged 25 to 44 make up about 22% of residents. That's the age profile of a town full of parents mid-mortgage and couples who moved out of London the moment the second child arrived. The young adult years are here, just not in large numbers, and the ones who grew up here tend to leave for university and return a couple of decades later with children of their own.
Money is the obvious common thread. The Office for National Statistics models median household income, before tax, at around £74,500 for the financial year to March 2023. That figure is a few years old and it's a gross household number, not anyone's take-home pay. It still explains how the house prices hold up, and why the conversations at the school gate sometimes sound more like mortgage advice.
Farnham has 22,410 residents living in 9,156 households, and how those households are made up says a lot about the town. About 30% are one person living alone, and about 15% of all households are pensioners living alone, a subset of that single-person share rather than an addition to it. Couples with children make up about 24% of households, and lone parents about 8%. It's two towns in one: the family houses near the schools, and the smaller homes and flats where people who raised their children here have moved once the children left.
Qualifications run high. About 49% of adults hold a degree or equivalent, and about 11% have no formal qualifications, so the town isn't uniform even if the high street suggests otherwise. Full-time students make up about 3% of residents, which is modest for a town with an arts university in it. Most of the students seem to live somewhere cheaper, which is the most Farnham fact of all.
Around 541 residents live in communal settings such as care homes and halls rather than private households. That's too few to change how the rest of the figures should be read, but it reminds you that the older end of the town is well provided for.
The community is one of Farnham's real strengths: settled, well-educated, comfortably off and in no rush to leave, which makes for a stable neighbourhood and a hard market to break into.