Mostly settled homeowners in middle age and beyond, plus a boarding school's worth of teenagers who are only here in term time. Six in ten households own their home. A third of households are one person living alone. Couples with children are fewer than the morning traffic suggests. Marlborough is a grown-up town with its youth on loan from the College.
About 61% of households own their home. About 18% rent privately and about 19% rent from a social landlord. That is more social renting than the town's reputation lets on, and it's why Marlborough is more mixed than its postcard suggests.
All the population figures here come from the 2021 Census. The median age is 46. Only about 17% of residents are aged 25 to 44, the years when most people buy a first home and start a family. Marlborough is not where that stage of life usually happens.
The Office for National Statistics models median household income at about £58,900 before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. It's a modelled figure for the wider area, not a reading from anyone's payslip, and it is not today's figure. It still describes a town that is more comfortable than stretched.
Households split in a way that surprises people who picture Marlborough as all family houses. About 35% are single-person households, and about 19% are pensioners living alone, a subset of that group rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children make up about 16%, and lone parents about 9%. The school run exists. It just isn't who most of the town is.
About 37% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, and about 15% have no formal qualifications. That is a wider spread than the town's image suggests. The full-time student figure of about 1% is misleading here: it counts only students who also work or are looking for work, so it leaves out the boarders almost entirely.
About 84% of residents describe their health as good or very good. At Wiltshire Council level, preventable deaths are better than the England rate and smoking is similar to England. Those are county figures with an England benchmark, not a verdict on Marlborough's own residents, but they fit with the rest of the picture.
This is the figure that changes how the rest should be read. Of the town's 9,490 residents, 1,255 live in communal establishments rather than private households, and the boarding school accounts for most of them. The age figures, especially, are shaped by pupils who arrive in September and leave in July. Take them out, and the permanent town is older and more settled than the headline numbers show.
Marlborough's population is one of its strengths: healthy, mostly owning their homes and reasonably well off. Anyone looking for neighbours in their thirties with toddlers will find fewer here than the house prices would lead them to expect.