Ingatestone is mostly home-owning families and older couples with comfortable incomes and a long view. Seven in ten own their home. The typical resident is in their mid-forties. Household incomes run high. Nearly one household in five is a pensioner living alone, and they own the place as firmly as anyone.
At the 2021 census, which supplies every population figure on this page, about 72% of Ingatestone's households owned their home, about 15% rented privately and about 12% rented from a council or housing association. Even Sir William Petre's almshouses on Stock Lane are private cottages now, which is about as thorough as home ownership gets in an English village.
The median age is 46, and people aged 25 to 44 make up about 23% of residents. That is a village whose working-age adults mostly arrived with a deposit and a family already under way, and whose younger adults tend to come back for Sunday lunch.
The Office for National Statistics models household income here at about £74,000 a year before tax for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across a wider statistical area than the village itself. Gross figures always look healthier than the payslip, and this one is three years old, but it still describes a place where two good salaries are the usual arrangement.
Ingatestone's 2,365 households come in a wide range of shapes, and lone parents head about 10% of them, a reminder that a wealthy village still has single-income homes paying the same council tax as everyone else.
About 31% of households are one person living alone, and within that, about 19% of all households are a single pensioner. Couples with dependent children make up about 20% of households. Couples with children and pensioners living alone are almost level, so the school run and the bus pass share the same pavements on the High Street every morning.
About 36% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 15% have no formal qualifications, and full-time students make up about 1%. The low student share mostly reflects where the census counts them: the village's university-age children are recorded at their term addresses, so Ingatestone loses them on paper every autumn.
Ingatestone is home to a comfortable, mostly middle-aged, home-owning population, and newcomers who arrive with equity tend to fit in quickly.