Ilford is home to young families who mostly rent. About six in ten households rent. The typical resident is in their early thirties. More than a quarter of households are couples with children. Graduates and people with no qualifications at all live side by side, and both groups are big.
Owners and private tenants are almost exactly level in Ilford. About 43% of households own their home and about 43% rent privately, with a further 12% in social housing. With the private-rented share that high, a neighbour on a quarter-term tenancy is as common as one on a quarter-century mortgage.
The median resident is 33, and about 33% of residents are aged 25 to 44. The railway arrived in 1839 and built Ilford's first commuting class, and the town still runs on people of working age heading somewhere each morning.
Household income was modelled at about £70,000 before tax for the financial year to March 2023, an average of the Office for National Statistics' estimates for the neighbourhoods that make up the area. It describes a past year and a whole district, and a household's own pay slip may look very different from it.
These figures, like the rest of the population numbers on this page, come from the 2021 Census. About 28% of Ilford's households are couples with children and about 13% are lone parents with children. About 20% are people living alone, and pensioners living alone account for about 6% of all households, a share that sits within the solo households and not on top of them. A town of family households with a modest share of solo living has plenty of the school run and not much of the empty nest.
Qualifications are split down the middle. About 40% of adults hold a degree or higher and about 20% have no formal qualifications, with full-time students making up about 4% of residents. That puts graduates and people with no qualifications on the same terraced streets, and plenty of households probably contain both.
About 85% of Ilford residents describe their health as good or very good. Across Redbridge as a whole, the death rate from preventable causes is better than the England average and smoking rates are similar to England's, both borough-level comparisons covering more than Ilford alone.
Ilford is a young, renting, hard-working town whose residents are under more pressure than the rest of Redbridge. The households here are busy with children and commutes, and fewer of them own the homes they live in than in most of the borough.