Felsted is home to comfortable owner-occupiers, a fair number of older people living alone, and a boarding school that bends every average it touches. About six in ten households own their home, and a third of adults hold a degree. One household in five is a pensioner on their own. Then there are a few hundred residents with a housemaster where everyone else has a mortgage.
The 2021 Census, the source for every population figure on this page, found about 63% of Felsted's households owning their home, about 20% renting privately and about 17% renting from a council or housing association. That social-rented share is higher than the price of a detached house here would lead anyone to guess, and it means the village holds a wider range of households than its reputation suggests.
The median age comes out at 44, and about 16% of residents are aged 25 to 44. Both numbers carry the boarders with them. A school full of teenagers pulls the typical age down, so the households themselves are older than 44 makes them look, and that thin slice of people aged 25 to 44 is the tell. Young working adults are the group Felsted has least of.
Household income across the wider area around Felsted, modelled by the Office for National Statistics, was about £70,000 a year before tax in the financial year to March 2023. After tax the same households took home about £49,000. Seventy thousand is the figure that gets repeated in conversation, and forty-nine thousand is the figure that has to cover a band G council tax bill.
About 32% of households are one person living alone, and about 21% are a pensioner living alone, a group that sits inside the first figure. Couples with dependent children make up about 19% of households and lone parents about 7%. For a village famous for a school, Felsted has a lot of houses where the children grew up and left, and the four-bedroom home with one occupant is a familiar arrangement here.
About 35% of adults hold a degree or equivalent, and about 17% have no formal qualifications at all, so the village holds both ends of the spectrum at once. About 2% are full-time students who are also working or looking for work, a census measure that misses most of Felsted's students entirely, since boarders at a school have neither jobs nor job searches to report.
Of Felsted's 1,233 residents, 273 live in communal establishments, mostly Felsted School's boarding houses, and 960 live in private households. That makes Felsted a village with a residential institution built into it, and anyone reading a Felsted figure that counts people, ages or students should first check whether it includes the school. The 960 are the village. The other 273 come with uniforms, timetables and somebody else's address on their forms.
Felsted's residents are comfortable, well qualified and settled in their own homes, with an older population and a broader spread of households behind the school's headline numbers than most visitors would guess. It is a solid community to buy into, provided the buyer can afford to.