People who work for a living and did not arrive on a relocation package. The town runs older than the national conversation about Cornwall would have you expect. About four in ten households rent. A third of households are one person. This is a place of ordinary working households rather than a retirement colony or a second-home shelf, and the numbers back that up rather harder than the estate agent photography does.
On tenure, Census 2021, which is the source for the population figures throughout this answer, records about 57% of homes as owner-occupied, around 24% privately rented and about 18% socially rented. That social-renting share is the one worth pausing on. It is high enough to mean the town has genuine mixed housing rather than a market where the only options are buy or pay a landlord, and it is part of why a place with a working high street still has people living above it.
The typical resident is 44. Around 23% of the population sits in the twenty-five to forty-four band, which is the age group that actually staffs a town, and its presence at that level is what separates Liskeard from the coastal parishes further west where the working-age middle has largely priced itself out.
Household income was about £43,000 in the financial year to March 2023, modelled for this area and measured gross, before any tax comes off. That figure describes that year rather than this one, and it should be read as the shape of local earnings rather than a current payslip.
Household make-up follows the age profile. About 33% of households are single-person, and roughly 16% are single pensioners, that second group being a subset of the first rather than an addition to it. Couples with children account for about 17% of households and lone parents about 12%. A town where a third of front doors open onto one person is a town with a lot of smaller properties in use, and it explains why the two-bedroom end of the market never goes quiet.
On qualifications, about 27% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and around 17% hold none at all, with full-time students at about 1%. That is a mixed picture rather than a polarised one, and the low student share simply reflects a town with no university attached to it.
Health locally reads reasonably. About 77% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and around 7% as bad or very bad. For the wider Cornwall council area, measured against England, the preventable mortality rate is classed as similar and adult smoking, at about 12%, is also classed as similar. Those two are council-area figures with an England benchmark rather than anything specific to this town.
Who lives here comes out below average on the wider measures of prosperity, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest to anyone weighing the move. What the figures actually describe is a working town with mixed tenure, an ordinary spread of earnings and enough people of working age to keep the place functioning, which is a different proposition from a struggling one and a very different proposition from a comfortable one.