Leatherhead is a comfortable working town of people in their middle years. Most households own their home. About four in ten rent. More than a third of households are one person living alone. Its residents are mostly earning, comfortable and not posh, which puts it at odds with how much of Surrey likes to be seen.
At the 2021 census, which is the source of every population figure here, about 58% of Leatherhead households owned their home. About 23% rented privately and 17% rented from a council or housing association. Leatherhead has a much larger renting share than the villages on the hills around it. St John's School came out from London in 1872 and the School for the Indigent Blind followed in 1900, so the town has a long record of taking in people and institutions that outgrew London.
The median resident is 40, and about 29% of residents are between 25 and 44. That is a town in the middle of its working life, with neither retirement nor a student population setting the tone.
The Office for National Statistics models gross household income, before tax, at about £66,500 for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across Leatherhead's neighbourhoods. It is enough to buy a flat at the town's median price without much strain, and enough to make a detached house in Fetcham something to think hard about.
About 36% of households are one person living alone, and 14% are a single pensioner, a group already counted inside that 36%. Couples with dependent children are about 18% of households, and lone parents about 10%. For a Surrey town, that is not many families. A town where flats are the most common home ends up with a lot of one-person households, and the families are mostly in the houses of Fetcham, Great Bookham and Little Bookham.
About 41% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 14% have no formal qualifications, and only about 1% are full-time students. That is a mixed town, with graduates and people who left school without qualifications living side by side. With hardly any students, nobody is carrying duvets up Kingston Road every September.
Leatherhead's population is a good, solid one for anyone moving in. It has stable middle-aged households, a healthy share of renters and enough income to keep the town going, without the money that sets the tone in the villages around it.