Mostly settled, older, owner-occupier. The median resident is 49. Seven in ten households own their home. About a quarter of workers work from home. A stable coastal population that leans older than the national average without being properly retired.
On tenure, roughly seven in ten households own their home outright or on a mortgage, about one in six rents privately, and roughly one in ten rents from a social landlord. Which puts owner-occupation well above the national average and rental participation well below it. It is a stable ownership market rather than a churning rental one, which reflects the town's demographic and its distance from a major commuter market. Buyers moving in are moving in to stay, not to sit out a few years in a rental before a career step lands them somewhere else.
On age, the median resident is 49. About a fifth of the population sits between 25 and 44, the classic first-time-buyer working-age band, which is a smaller share than the national average. What that means for the feel of the town is that it does not read as a young town, and it does not read as a retirement-only town either. It reads as a stable middle-and-older population where the school-run generation is real but not the loudest voice in the room.
On income, the typical household here earns about £51,000 a year. That is a working household income rather than a professional-couple one, and it is what you would expect for a coastal town whose economy runs on local shops, offices, small businesses, and the ordinary trade of people who work locally or across the wider commuter belt. About a quarter of workers now work from home, which changes the daytime population and the shape of the coffee-shop economy in ways that were not true a decade ago. A household on that median income can genuinely afford to live in the town it works in, which on the south coast is now the exception rather than the rule.
On household make-up, about a third of households are one-person households, nearly one in five is a single pensioner, and roughly one in six is a couple with children. Lone-parent households sit at about one in ten. Around one in twenty residents reports bad or very bad health, and roughly four in five report good or very good health, which is close to the national mid-point. Roughly a quarter of residents hold a degree-level qualification, and about a fifth hold none. Unemployment sits low at around 2%. What that sketches is a town where households are diverse in size and stage, income and skills are middling, and the picture refuses to fit anyone's tidy stereotype about who a coastal-town population actually is.
On who lives here, Littlehampton is unremarkable in the way that most working English towns are unremarkable. Mostly owning, mostly older than the national average, mostly on middling incomes, and mostly staying put. Which is not a story anyone puts on a marketing brochure, and is not a bad answer to the question of what a town's population should actually look like.