An older, settled, largely owner-occupying town that is much quieter indoors than its reputation outdoors. The typical resident is past fifty. Nearly four in ten households are one person living alone. Around two thirds own their homes. The place the rest of the country pictures as one continuous gathering turns out, once you get past the high street, to be a town of people who go home and shut the door.
On tenure, about 64% of homes are owned outright or on a mortgage, roughly 21% are privately rented and around 14% are social rented. That is a stable ownership base for a town with a transient reputation, and it is the single fact that most contradicts the way outsiders imagine the place.
The age profile is the other one. The median age is 50, and only about 21% of residents fall into the 25 to 44 band. That missing slice is the one usually busy raising children and paying the largest mortgages, and its absence shapes everything from the school rolls to what the shops sell.
On money, modelled household income for the area came to around £47,900 for the financial year to March 2023, measured gross, before any tax comes off. After tax the equivalent figure sits at roughly £36,700. Both describe that year rather than this one, and both are modelled averages for the wider statistical areas rather than a payslip from any particular street.
Household composition, from the 2021 census, which is also the source for the population and tenure figures here, shows about 38% of households containing one person. Within that group, roughly 17% of all households are a single pensioner. Those two figures overlap rather than stack, and together they describe a town where living alone is the most common arrangement rather than an unusual one.
Families are the minority. Around 12% of households are a couple with dependent children and about 11% are lone parents. For a town with this many primary schools within reach, that is a smaller family share than the school provision would lead you to expect, and it reflects an age profile that has been drifting older for a long time.
On qualifications, about 33% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and roughly 17% hold none at all. Full-time students account for about 1%, which is what happens when the nearest higher education is somewhere else entirely. The mix is genuinely mixed rather than concentrated at either end, which is unusual for a town this size and worth noticing.
Health self-reports are decent. Around 78% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 6% describe it as bad or very bad. Across the Somerset council area, which covers far more ground than this town, the preventable mortality rate comes out better than the England average, and adult smoking sits at roughly 11%, similar to England as a whole. Those two are county-level measures rather than Glastonbury's own.
Who lives here is an older, settled population on ordinary money, and on the broader measures of how comfortably off a town is, Glastonbury sits below average rather than above it. The mysticism is what the place sells. The people buying the groceries afterwards are running perfectly normal households on perfectly normal budgets.