Houghton Regis is mostly young families who own their homes. Six in ten households own. The typical resident is in their late thirties. Nearly a quarter of households are couples with children. It is a town of family houses and plenty of school runs.
Owners outnumber renters, though by less than in the villages nearby. About 60% of households own their home, about 15% rent privately and about 24% rent from a council or housing association. The social-rented share is a legacy of the London overspill estates of the 1950s and 60s, which were built to house people rather than to be sold to them.
The town runs young. The median resident is 37, and about 30% of people are between 25 and 44, the age band that buys a first family house and then needs a second bedroom almost straight away. The overspill estates were built for young families and still attract them.
The Office for National Statistics modelled average household income across the area at about £57,500 before tax for the financial year to March 2023. That is a gross figure, and a few years old, so it describes earnings before the tax office and three years of rising prices had their turn. It covers a mortgage on an ordinary three-bed here and leaves less room for anything grander.
The make-up of households follows from that. Census 2021, the source for every population figure here, counted about 23% of households as couples with dependent children and about 15% as lone parents. About 25% of households are one person living alone, and about 9% are pensioners living alone, a group already counted within that quarter. School gates and supermarket car parks get busy at the same times every day.
On qualifications, about 26% of adults hold a degree and about 21% have no formal qualifications, with about 2% in full-time study. It is a town whose working lives run through the industrial estates and the business park as much as through offices, and the qualifications reflect that.
About 83% of residents describe their health as good or very good. For Central Bedfordshire as a whole, deaths from preventable causes run better than the England rate, and smoking is similar to the national level. Those are authority-wide figures, so they describe the whole county rather than the town's own streets.
On the measures that usually mark a place out as well-off, Houghton Regis comes out below average. It is a working family town that makes do on ordinary pay rather than a commuter town living off London salaries.