People who have already made their money and people still working for it, in roughly equal measure and mostly under separate roofs. Seven in ten own their homes. The typical resident is nearer fifty than forty. A third of households contain exactly one person. This is a town of settled owners and small households, not the young-family boom town the new estates might lead you to expect.
On tenure, around 70% of households own their home, about 19% rent privately and roughly 10% rent from a social landlord. That ownership level is high, and it does most of the work in explaining why the place feels stable rather than transient. Renters exist here, but the market is thin enough that anyone arriving to rent first and buy later should expect a short list.
The age profile follows from that. The median resident is 49, and the twenty-five to forty-four age band accounts for around 20% of the population. A town where a fifth of people are in their prime family-forming years and the middle of the distribution is approaching fifty is a town whose schools are busy and whose evenings are not.
Household income sits at around £50,300 a year gross, before tax. That is a modelled figure describing the financial year to March 2023 rather than the position today, and it covers total household income rather than individual earnings, so a two-earner household is doing the lifting in most cases.
Lone parents head around 9% of households, and couples with dependent children account for roughly 17%. Those two together are a minority of the town, which is the fact most at odds with how Gillingham presents itself.
Taking the Census in 2021 as the source for all of this, around 32% of households are a single person living alone, and about 18% are a single pensioner, that second figure being part of the first rather than an addition to it. Add the roughly 17% of households that are couples with dependent children and the shape becomes clear: a lot of one-person households, a solid family core, and comparatively little in between.
On qualifications, around 26% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 18% hold none. Full-time students make up roughly 1% of the population, which is what happens in a town with no higher education institution and a long drive to the nearest one. The mix is ordinary rather than skewed in either direction.
Health self-reports well. Around 81% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 5% as bad or very bad. Across the wider Dorset local authority, which is the geography those comparisons use rather than the town itself, preventable mortality runs better than the England average and smoking prevalence is similar to it. Air pollution's contribution to mortality across the authority is not compared against England in the published figures.
Around 105 people live in communal establishments rather than private households, which is small enough that it does not distort any of the shares above.
The people picture here is solidly middling: comfortable, settled, well housed, neither struggling nor especially prosperous, and older than the marketing implies. If you want a town where nobody is in a hurry and most of your neighbours own the house they are standing in, this is that town.