Gloucester's residents are mostly working households around forty, and most of them have a mortgage. About six in ten own their home. The typical resident is in their late thirties. About one in five rents privately. The cathedral gets the visitors, but most of the people who live here are in the semis.
Of the 121,003 people the 2021 census counted in Gloucester, the census is also the source for every population share on this page. About 63% of households own their home, 21% rent privately and 14% rent from a council or housing association. A rental market that size moves steadily without ever being the main thing going on, and a city where nearly two-thirds own is one where people tend to stay put.
The median age is 39, and about 27% of residents are between 25 and 44. That is the age of first mortgages, second children and arguments about which secondary school to put first on the form. The University of Gloucestershire has a campus at Oxstalls, but full-time students are about 3% of residents, so the age profile is set by people with jobs, not lectures.
Household income across the city was modelled by the Office for National Statistics at about £52,000 before tax for the financial year to March 2023. That is gross pay for the whole household, three years old and averaged across neighbourhoods, so it describes the city broadly and not any particular road. On a street of two-earner semis it may sound low, while in a one-pensioner flat it would sound like a fortune.
Lone-parent households make up about 11% of the total. Couples with children are about 19%, which is the household the city's three-bed semis were built for.
About 31% of households are one person living alone, and about 12% are a pensioner living alone, a group counted within that 31% and not alongside it. That leaves a sizeable share of the city's homes holding one adult, from young renters near the docks to widowed owners in the post-war suburbs.
About 28% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 19% have no qualifications. Gloucester has room for both, often on the same street, and the city's four grammar schools sit alongside comprehensives because the population needs both kinds of school.
Gloucester's population is middling: mostly working-age homeowners, without a big student or retired population at either end. The people who live here are mainly getting on with mortgages, jobs and school places.