Kempston is a town of working families paying off a mortgage, with a sizeable minority renting and a fair number living alone. Most households own their home. About a third rent. The typical resident is under forty. Students barely register.
About 63% of Kempston's households own their home. Private renting accounts for 17% of households and social housing for 18%. That puts council and housing-association landlords level with the private landlords, and slightly ahead.
The typical resident is 39, and about 29% of people are aged 25 to 44. That is the age of first children and second mortgages, and the town is built around both.
Household income averaged about £54,000 a year before tax in the financial year to March 2023, a gross figure the Office for National Statistics models for the area. That figure covers whole households, often with two earners, and it is the one people quote before the tax and the mortgage come out.
Figures from the 2021 census describe what kind of households these are. About 20% are couples with dependent children and 14% are lone parents with children. Roughly 27% of households are one person living alone, and about 10% of all households are a pensioner living alone. Most homes here have three bedrooms, and most of them have children in.
About 28% of adults have a degree and 19% have no formal qualifications. Only 2% of residents are full-time students. Cranfield University is on the area's list of places of education, but its students mostly live somewhere else. The mix runs from graduates in office jobs to people who went straight into work at the warehouses and depots, and both live on the same streets.
About 83% of residents described their health as good or very good at the census. Across Bedford Borough, preventable deaths run at a rate similar to England's, and about 12% of adults smoke, also similar to the national level. Those are borough-wide figures with an England benchmark, so they describe the borough's health services and habits, and nobody should hold Kempston's own residents accountable for them.
Kempston's population is middling in the most useful sense. It is a mix of owners and renters, graduates and school-leavers, young families and people living alone, with no single group running the place.