Hampstead is mostly educated, working-age adults living in flats, and more of them rent than own. About two-thirds hold a degree. The typical resident is in their late thirties. Close to four in ten live alone. Household incomes before tax are high even by London standards, and so is the rent that comes out of them.
Census 2021, the source for every population figure on this page, counted 54,809 people in Hampstead across 24,912 households. About 41% of households own their home, about 40% rent privately and about 19% rent from a council or housing association. Owners are a minority in one of the most expensive postcodes in London, and the landlords who make up the difference mostly live somewhere else.
The median resident is 38, and about 35% of people are aged 25 to 44. That is a place where people do their careers, not one they move to after their careers are over.
The Office for National Statistics models typical gross household income in Hampstead at about £84,000 a year before tax for the financial year to March 2023, or about £60,780 after tax on its separate net estimate for the same year. Both figures are a few years old now, and the net one is what is left to pay a rent or a mortgage measured in Hampstead terms.
About 38% of households are one person living alone, and about 12% are a single pensioner living alone, a group counted within the solo households, not on top of them. Couples with dependent children make up about 18% of households and lone parents about 9%. With most of the homes being flats, the ones and twos far outnumber the families, who tend to cluster in the minority of houses with gardens.
About 68% of adults hold a degree or higher qualification, about 9% have no qualifications, and full-time students make up about 2% of residents. Hampstead's name for being home to the intelligentsia goes back to the late nineteenth century, and two-thirds of the adults hold the certificates to keep it up. Very few of them are still studying, so the degrees were mostly earned somewhere else and brought here afterwards.
About 88% of residents rated their own health good or very good at the census. Across Camden as a whole, the rate of deaths from preventable causes is better than England's, and the share of adults who smoke, about 12%, is similar to the England figure. Those are borough measures that cover all of Camden, so they describe Hampstead only as one part of a wider area.
Hampstead's residents are well educated, mostly working age and comfortably paid, with more renters and people living alone than its reputation for big family houses suggests. That makes it a strong place to live for people in that position and a harder one for a growing family looking for a house.