Owner-occupiers, mostly, and most of them are past the school run. Around seven in ten households own their home. The typical resident is in their mid-fifties. More than a third of households are one person living alone, and only about one in ten is a couple with children. Looe did not empty out. It simply stopped needing to fill up.
On tenure, 68% of households own their home outright or with a mortgage, 18% rent privately and 13% rent from a social landlord. That ownership level is high, and in a coastal town it usually means the same thing: people who bought a while ago and stayed, plus people who arrived with the proceeds of somewhere more expensive.
The age profile is the number that shapes everything else. The median resident is 56, and just 16% of the population falls in the 25 to 44 band that most towns build their labour market around. A town missing much of its early-career middle is a town where the pub quiz has a different demographic from the one you might picture, and where the local job market and the local housing market have quietly stopped talking to each other.
Household income runs to about £40,800 gross, before tax, in modelled figures describing the financial year to March 2023 rather than today. After tax, that comes down to around £33,100. Those are middling sums, and they sit in a town where the housing is priced by people whose income was earned somewhere with better transport links.
The household make-up follows the age profile. All the population figures on this page come from the 2021 census. Single-person households account for 36% of the total, and single pensioners make up 20%, which is a subset of that first figure rather than an addition to it. Couples with children are 11% and lone-parent households 8%. Put plainly, roughly one household in five is a pensioner living alone, which is the single most useful sentence in this answer for anyone weighing up what daily life here actually looks like.
On qualifications, 29% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and 19% hold none at all, with full-time students at 2%. That spread describes a town with a professional layer and a long-standing working population living side by side, which is exactly what you would find in a place built on fishing, boatbuilding and, more recently, visitors.
Health self-reports are reasonable rather than remarkable. Around 76% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and 8% describe it as bad or very bad, which is what a high median age tends to produce. At Cornwall level, benchmarked against England, smoking prevalence at 12% is similar to the England figure, and the preventable mortality rate of 140 per 100,000 is also similar to England. Those are council-wide measures with a national comparison attached, not Looe's own, and they describe systems and services rather than the people using them.
One technical note worth carrying: 155 residents live in communal establishments such as care homes rather than private households, out of a total population of 5,859. That is small enough not to distort the household shares above, but it is consistent with everything else on this page.
By the measures that go into how a place is doing, Looe sits below the national middle rather than above it. This is a settled, older, largely owner-occupying town living on modest incomes, and anyone expecting coastal-Cornwall prices to indicate coastal-Cornwall wealth has confused what the houses cost with what the people in them earn.