Hayes is mostly home to young working households who rent, which is what the town was built for in the first place. More than half the households rent. The typical resident is in their mid-thirties. Families with children outnumber people living alone. Hayes grew up housing the factory workforce, and it still houses people who go out to work.
Around 42% of Hayes households own their home. About 35% rent privately and about 21% rent from the council or a housing association. Homeowners are in the minority here, and landlords decide who lives on a good share of the town's streets. After the First World War, Hayes put up garden-suburb housing for factory workers. Many of those houses now belong to landlords.
All the population figures on this page come from the 2021 census, which counted 58,296 residents in Hayes. The typical resident was 35, and about 33% were aged between 25 and 44. That age group is the core of Hayes, people old enough to have a job and a tenancy and still too young to have settled down. The town has never had many retirees, and it still does not.
The Office for National Statistics models household income in Hayes at about £65,700 before tax for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across the area. That is gross pay from a few years ago, before rent, childcare and the rest. It is also an average across homeowners and tenants alike, so it covers a wide range. In a town where one household in five is overcrowded, the money is spread across a lot of people.
Household size is where the 20% overcrowding figure comes from. That is the 2021 census share of homes with fewer rooms than the people living in them need. Many Hayes homes are full, mostly with families.
About 23% of households are couples with children, and about 15% are lone parents with children. About 21% are people living alone, and about 7% of all households are a single pensioner, a group that sits inside the living-alone figure. Families with children make up a larger part of Hayes than people living on their own. That shapes everything from the queues at the school gates to the competition for every three-bedroom house on the market.
About 32% of residents aged 16 and over hold a degree-level qualification, about 24% have no formal qualifications, and about 3% are full-time students. Graduates and residents with no qualifications appear in fairly similar numbers. Hayes has no university setting its age profile, and its graduates are mostly people who have moved here for work and a cheaper rent.
About 85% of Hayes residents described their health as good or very good at the census, and about 4% as bad or very bad. Hillingdon as a whole has a preventable death rate that is better than the England average. Its smoking rate, about 11% across the borough, is similar to England's. Those are borough figures with an England benchmark, and they do not describe Hayes on its own.
Hayes is a young, renting, hard-working town with more families than it has room for. Its residents are getting by more than getting on.