Greenhithe is mostly young working households who own their homes, with a sizeable minority renting in the newer flats. Six in ten own. The typical resident is in their mid-thirties. Incomes are comfortable before tax. It is a place where people buy their first or second home and then commute somewhere else to pay for it.
At the 2021 Census about 59% of households in the Greenhithe area owned their home, outright or with a mortgage. About 27% rented privately and about 11% rented from a council or housing association. The private renters are concentrated in the riverside flats on the newer estates, a slice of the market that landlords bought into early and have kept.
The median age is about 36, and about 36% of residents are between 25 and 44. That is the age of the first mortgage, the second child and the long commute, and the estates built over the last 25 years were designed for exactly that buyer. The grandparents mostly live somewhere else.
The Office for National Statistics modelled typical household income across the area at about £64,000 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That is gross income averaged over the wider area, so it says little about any single household, and the take-home figure is noticeably smaller. In practice it describes two earners on decent salaries, enough for a terrace with a mortgage and not enough to make the detached houses feel easy.
The Census, which is the source for every population figure on this page, counted about 30% of households as one person living alone, and about 6% as a single pensioner living alone, a group that is part of the one-person total and not added to it. Couples with dependent children made up about 24% of households and lone parents about 11%. The flats account for most of the people living alone, and the three-bed terraces account for most of the school runs.
About 35% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 13% have no formal qualifications at all. Full-time students make up only about 2%, so the population is people working and not people studying. The degree holders and the people who left school at sixteen live on the same estates, park in the same car parks and queue at the same station.
Greenhithe is a middling, mixed place to live among. Its residents are young, mostly working and fairly comfortable, with nothing especially rich or poor about them, which is roughly what a riverside commuter village built in the last few decades was supposed to produce.