Kensington is full of well-educated, well-paid people, and most of them rent. Seven in ten adults hold a degree. Fewer than half of households own their home. Nearly four in ten people live alone. Kensington is a neighbourhood of high earners who rent expensive flats and mostly stay healthy.
At the 2021 Census, which supplies all the population figures here, about 44% of Kensington's households owned their home and about 48% rented from a private landlord. Social renting accounts for most of the rest. With that much private renting, a fair share of the street turns over at every lease renewal, and the neighbour you have only just learned the name of may have moved out by spring.
The typical resident is 41, and about 29% of people are aged 25 to 44. Kensington is more settled than a young professionals' district, and it has plenty of people old enough to buy who have decided, or been forced to decide by the prices, that they would rather rent here than buy somewhere else.
Gross household income, before tax, averaged about £87,700 in the financial year to March 2023. The figure is modelled by the Office for National Statistics for neighbourhoods and then averaged across the area. It's a healthy income almost anywhere, and in Kensington it mostly pays the rent on a nice flat.
Households are small. About 38% are one person living alone, and about 11% are a pensioner living alone, which is part of that 38%. Couples with dependent children make up about 16% of households and lone parents about 7%. The most common household in Kensington is a single adult, usually renting.
Qualifications run high. About 69% of adults hold a degree-level qualification, about 7% have no qualifications, and full-time students are about 1.5% of the population. Very few students live here, because few could afford it. The people with degrees finished them years ago and moved in once the salary arrived.
About 91% of Kensington residents describe their health as good or very good. On the wider measures for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, preventable deaths are better than the England rate, and adult smoking, at about 8%, is similar to the England figure. Those are borough-level measures benchmarked against England.
Kensington's residents are one of its real strengths. Most rent, and by almost every other measure they are healthy, highly educated and well paid.