Finchley is home to well-qualified people around forty, and they own their homes only a little more often than they rent. Just over half own. About four in ten rent from a private landlord. More than half have a degree. It is a district of people who did the reading and then did the maths on a mortgage, and plenty of them are still doing the maths.
The 2021 census counted about 29,700 people in Finchley, in about 11,900 households, and every figure on this page comes from that census unless it says otherwise. About 55% of households own their home, about 39% rent privately and about 5% rent from a council or housing association. With that many flats, the owner and the tenant often share a front door, and the post gets sorted by whoever comes down the stairs first.
The typical resident is about 40, and about 32% of people are aged 25 to 44. Finchley is full of people in the middle of their careers, mortgages and school applications all at once. Very few are here passing through, and very few have finished with any of the three.
The Office for National Statistics models household income at about £81,500 a year before tax for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across the area. That figure is three years old, and it is the amount before the taxman and the mortgage lender take their shares.
About 28% of households are one person living alone, and about 11% of all households are a single pensioner, who are part of that same group. Couples with children make up about 23% of households and lone parents about 9%. People living alone slightly outnumber couples with children. In practice, the neighbours split fairly evenly between those who have to be up at seven for the school run and those who can choose to be.
About 57% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 13% have no qualifications at all. Full-time students make up about 2% of residents. Finchley is a well-educated district with no student population to speak of, so its graduates mostly finished their degrees somewhere else and arrived with a job.
About 87% of Finchley's residents described their health as good or very good. Across Barnet, deaths from preventable causes run at a rate better than the England average, and smoking is similar to England's. Those last two comparisons belong to the whole borough and to how Barnet compares nationally. They do not describe Finchley's own residents.
Finchley's population is one of the better reasons to live there. It is educated, well paid, healthy and mostly working, though rather more of it is renting than the house prices would lead anyone to expect.