Hoddesdon is mostly home-owning families and couples in mid-life. Seven in ten households own their home. The typical resident is just past forty. About a quarter of households are one person living alone. It is an ordinary commuter town, and most people who move in stay put.
All the population figures on this page come from the 2021 Census, which counted about 42,850 people in 17,350 households across Hoddesdon, Broxbourne, Turnford and Wormley. About 70% of households own their home. About 17% rent privately and about 12% rent from a council or housing association. William Ellis, the missionary and author, moved here in 1844 and lived in the town until he died in 1872, which is still a common pattern in Hoddesdon.
The median age is 41. About 26% of residents are aged 25 to 44, the years when most people are paying a mortgage and raising young children. This is not a young town, and it is not a retirement town either.
For the financial year to March 2023, the Office for National Statistics models the average household income across the area at about £64,000 a year before tax. After tax and other deductions, the figure is about £46,000. The gross figure sounds generous, but the mortgage gets paid from the smaller one.
Households are a mix of family types. Couples with children make up about 22% of households and lone parents about 13%, so a large share of homes have children in them. Those are the families the local primary schools and parks are full of.
About 27% of households are one person living alone. Single pensioners living alone make up about 13% of all households, and they are counted within that 27%, not on top of it. The rest of the town is largely couples, many of whose children have already left home. You are as likely to have a widowed neighbour as a young family next door.
About 27% of adults hold a degree, about 19% have no formal qualifications and about 2% of residents are full-time students. The town has no university pulling in young adults, so the student figure stays low. Elizabeth I granted Hoddesdon a free grammar school in her charter, and it had closed by the end of the same century.
Hoddesdon is an average, unremarkable town in who lives here. It is mostly home-owning families and couples in their forties and older, with a mix of qualifications and incomes and no single group dominating.