Hatfield is a working New Town with a university wedged inside it. Fewer than half of households own their home. The typical resident is just past thirty. Thousands live in halls and other shared accommodation. Read every figure here knowing the campus is in it, because the settled town underneath is older and steadier than the headline numbers make it look.
The 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure on this page, found about 43% of Hatfield's households owning their home. Private renters make up about 27% and social renters about 29%. Social renting edging out the private landlords is what a New Town built by a development corporation still looks like, two generations on.
The median age is 31, and about 29% of residents are aged 25 to 44. Those are real figures, but the University of Hertfordshire sits inside the town's boundary and pulls them down hard, since the age profile peaks in the late teens and early twenties. The campus drags the average age down every September, and the town gets it back every June.
Household income across Hatfield averages about £61,300 a year before tax, a figure modelled by the Office for National Statistics for the financial year to March 2023. That is gross income, before deductions, and it is now a few years old. It describes a town of ordinary working households more than a commuter enclave, and a buyer reading it should remember that the payslip version is smaller.
The census breaks Hatfield's households down this way: about 26% are one person living alone, and within that, about 10% are a pensioner living alone. Couples with dependent children make up about 20% of households, and lone parents about 12%. The rest are couples without children at home, shared houses and other arrangements, which in a university town includes the private student lets that never make it into the halls figure.
About 35% of residents hold a degree and about 14% have no formal qualifications. The census puts full-time students at about 11%, but that count only takes in students who also have a job or are looking for one, so it badly understates how many students live here; the real share is plainly much higher, given the age profile. The degree figure is likewise partly made up of people who work at the university or recently left it.
Of Hatfield's 42,166 residents, about 4,500 live in communal accommodation, which here means mostly halls of residence, along with care homes. The other 37,668 live in private households, and that is the town a buyer is moving into. It makes Hatfield two populations sharing one census: a settled New Town of families, renters and pensioners, and a campus that refills every autumn. Anyone using these numbers to picture a street should picture the first one, since the second mostly lives on the campus.
Set the students aside and Hatfield's population is ordinary in almost every direction, a middling working town with nothing extreme about it, which is either reassuring or dull depending on what a buyer came looking for.