Graduates in their thirties, mostly renting. More than half the adults hold a degree. The typical resident is in their mid-thirties. Most households rent. It is a town of people with letters after their names and a landlord's number in their phone.
Only about 46% of Kingston's households own their home, outright or with a mortgage. About 35% rent privately and about 18% rent from a council or housing association. For a town where half the high street is built to sell people things, a lot of the residents are still waiting to buy the biggest one.
The 2021 Census, which is the source for the population figures on this page, puts the median age in Kingston at 34. About 32% of residents are aged 25 to 44, the years of first jobs, first flats and first serious conversations about whether a second bedroom counts as a nursery. The town is young without being studenty, and the median resident is old enough to have opinions about parking and young enough to still be renting while they have them.
Money is not the problem for most. The Office for National Statistics models gross household income in Kingston at about £93,000 a year, before tax, for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across the area. That is the figure before income tax, the pension and the landlord each take their turn, and in a town where most people rent, the landlord's turn is the big one.
Households here come in all shapes, with the single flat the most common. About 32% of households are one person living alone, and about 9% are a pensioner living alone, a group that sits within that single-person figure. Couples with children make up about 20% of households, and lone parents about 10%. Kingston is a place where the flat for one outnumbers the family house, which is roughly what the housing stock would predict.
Qualifications run high. About 53% of adults hold a degree or equivalent, about 11% have no formal qualifications, and about 6% of residents are full-time students. Kingston Polytechnic became Kingston University in 1992, and the town has the graduate count of a place that has been handing out degrees for a while and then watching the graduates stay for the rent.
Most people describe themselves as healthy. About 87% of Kingston residents report good or very good health at the census. Across the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, the rate of deaths from preventable causes is better than the England average, and smoking, at about 8% of adults, is similar to England. Those two are borough-wide measures benchmarked against the country as a whole, so they cover Chessington and Coombe as much as the town centre.
About 1,422 people live in communal establishments such as halls of residence and care homes, with the rest in private households. That is enough to notice in the town centre's figures, though it does not change the overall picture of a young, working, mainly renting population.
Kingston's population is one of the town's real strengths: educated, healthy, well paid on paper and young enough to keep the place busy. The catch for buyers is that the people best placed to buy here are still, for the most part, renting it.