Owners, mostly, and they arrived before you did. More than eight in ten households own their home. The median resident is closer to sixty than fifty. Almost a third of households are one person living alone. Ferndown is not somewhere people move to for a chapter of their life. It is where the chapters stop.
Tenure is the fact everything else hangs off. Around 84% of households are owner-occupiers, with roughly 11% renting privately and about 5% in social housing. A town where five homes in six are owned outright or on a mortgage behaves differently from one where the rental market churns: people know their neighbours, the gardens are maintained, and nobody is going anywhere in a hurry. It also means the supply of anything to rent is thin, and what exists is not aimed at people starting out.
The age profile follows directly. The median age is around 59, and only about 16% of residents are aged between twenty-five and forty-four. That second number is the one that surprises people. The stage of life most towns are built around, early career, small children, first mortgage, is a minority interest here.
On money, the typical household income across the area was roughly £52,300 gross, before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That is a modelled figure describing that year rather than a current pay packet, and it sits alongside a net figure of about £38,800 once tax comes off. Comfortable rather than wealthy, which matches a town of paid-off bungalows more than one of high earners.
Family households are in the minority. Around 13% of households are a couple with dependent children, and about 6% are lone parents. Ferndown does have families, and the schools are busy, but the school run is not the organising rhythm of the town in the way it is in a newer estate ten miles away.
The rest of the household picture comes from the 2021 Census, which is the source for every population figure on this page. Roughly 32% of households are a single person living alone, and around 23% are a single pensioner, that second group being a subset of the first rather than an addition to it. Nearly a quarter of all households in this town, then, are one older person in a house that was built for more. That has consequences the property listings never mention: a steady trickle of large homes coming to market, and a lot of spare bedrooms doing nothing in particular.
Qualifications are mixed rather than concentrated. About 29% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, around 18% have none at all, and roughly 1% are full-time students. That is a spread rather than a cluster, and it is what you would expect from a place that filled up with people at the end of their working lives rather than the start.
Health self-reporting is reasonable given the age profile. Around 79% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 5% as bad or very bad. At the wider Dorset level, which covers the whole council area rather than Ferndown alone, the preventable mortality rate is better than the England average, and smoking sits at roughly 10%, similar to England.
One footnote worth knowing before reading any of the above too literally. Of about 14,100 residents, 206 live in communal establishments such as care homes rather than private households. That is small enough not to distort the household shares, and specific enough to explain why a town this size supports the number of care settings it does.
The people here are settled, comfortable and older than the national picture, and that combination is one of the more reliable things about the place. Ferndown does not attract residents so much as retain them.