Owners, mostly, and mostly not young. Renting barely exists as an option. More than a quarter of households are one person on their own. Only about one household in ten is a couple with children. Lelant is largely made up of people who did the busy part of life somewhere else and came here afterwards.
The tenure split is the clearest fact about the place. Around 85% of households own their home, about 12% rent privately and roughly 3% rent socially. Landlords have never got much of a foothold here, which keeps the population stable and makes the village unusually hard to move into on a short lease while you work out whether you like it.
The age profile follows from that. The median resident is 59, and only about 14% of people are aged between 25 and 44. That band fills offices and school gates in most places. Here it is the thinnest slice of the village, and its absence shapes everything from the shop opening hours to how quickly a For Sale board comes down.
On money, modelled household income for the area ran to about £48,300 gross, before tax, in the financial year to March 2023, which works out around £35,400 once tax is taken off. That is a figure describing a particular year rather than today's pay packets, and in a place where a large share of residents are past working age, it mixes pensions and investment income in with salaries rather than describing a workforce.
Household make-up, from the 2021 Census, which is the source behind every population figure here, shows about 27% of households are a single person, and roughly 17% are a pensioner living alone, that second group sitting inside the first rather than alongside it. Couples with children account for around 11% and lone-parent households about 6%. The picture is one of small households: people on their own, couples without children at home, and a modest number of families holding the average down.
Qualifications lean towards the top of the scale. Around 37% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 13% have no formal qualifications, with full-time students at half of one percent. Nobody is moving to Lelant to study, and that student figure is the cleanest proof that the village has no institutional life pulling young adults in.
Health reads as unremarkable in the good sense. About 79% of residents report good or very good health and roughly 6% report bad or very bad health, notable in a place with an age profile this old. At the wider Cornwall council level rather than the village's own, smoking sits at about 12% of adults and is rated similar to England, and the preventable mortality rate is also rated similar to England. Those are council-area benchmarks, and they say nothing about any particular street here.
As a community profile this comes out middling: comfortable, well-qualified, healthy for its age, and notably short of the working-age households that would make it feel like a town rather than a retirement-adjacent village. Whether that reads as peace or as a waiting room depends entirely on which end of the age curve you are arriving from.