People who arrived early, and people who never left. The median resident is comfortably past fifty. Single-person households are the largest household type in the town. Families with children are a small minority. Half the homes are owned outright by the people standing in them, and a quarter are rented from a landlord who is not a private one.
On tenure, about 53% of homes are owner-occupied. Around 21% are privately rented and roughly 24% are socially rented, which is a notably high social housing share for a coastal town where holiday accommodation dominates the commercial stock. That combination, substantial ownership alongside substantial social renting, is the thing that stops Marazion being the second-home cliche it might otherwise be.
The age profile is the headline. Census 2021 puts the median age at about 53, and just roughly 17% of residents fall in the 25 to 44 band. That is the age group that usually fills a town's rental market, its primary school and its evening economy, and here it is thin. The census is the source for every population figure on this page.
Household income sits at about £44,600 gross before tax, a modelled figure describing the financial year to March 2023 rather than today. Net of tax, the equivalent modelled figure is around £35,800. Set against local house prices, the arithmetic explains itself: the people already in these homes largely bought them at a different price, and new arrivals mostly bring money from elsewhere rather than earn it here.
Household make-up follows the age profile closely. About 39% of households are a single person, and around 23% are a lone pensioner, that second figure being a subset of the first rather than an addition to it. Couples with children account for roughly 13%, and lone parent households for about 10%. In a town where two-fifths of the doors open onto one person, the school gate is a smaller social institution than the harbour wall.
On qualifications, around 30% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 20% hold none at all, with full-time students at roughly 1%. That is a wide spread rather than a uniform population, and it describes a place where people who came for the coast in later life share streets with people who have worked here all along.
Health reads mixed. Around 75% of residents report good or very good health, while about 9% report bad or very bad health. The wider comparisons are local-authority figures with an England benchmark rather than Marazion's own: Cornwall's smoking rate of roughly 12% is classed as similar to England, and its preventable mortality rate of about 140 per 100,000 is also classed as similar. The county sits in line with the national picture rather than above or below it.
Worth noting for reading everything above correctly: only 2 of the 1,520 residents live in communal establishments rather than private households, so none of these shares are distorted by a large care home or campus sitting inside the boundary.
The population profile is one of the weaker parts of the picture here, with an ageing base, a thin working-age middle and a fifth of residents holding no formal qualifications, and a buyer moving here with young children should understand they are joining a minority rather than a majority.