Marlow is lived in by settled, well-off owners on the far side of forty. Seven in ten households own their home. Nearly half the adults hold a degree. Almost nobody is out of work. People arrive here with money and then stay long enough to become part of the scenery.
Every population figure here comes from the 2021 Census unless it says otherwise. About 72% of Marlow's 6,861 households own their home, about 17% rent privately and about 11% rent from a social landlord. With ownership that high, most streets change hands slowly, and the people on them tend to know which house sold, to whom, and for how much.
The median resident is 47, and people aged 25 to 44 make up only about 21% of the population of around 16,100. That is the age band busiest building careers and families, and here it is the thinnest. The typical first-time buyer in that bracket is still saving for Marlow, often from somewhere cheaper down the line to Maidenhead.
The Office for National Statistics modelled gross household income, before tax, at about £77,000 a year for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across the area. That is comfortable by most standards and still describes the middle of the town; the detached houses near the river were mostly bought with money that arrived well before the salary did.
Unemployment is about 2%, and households come in every shape. About 23% are couples with dependent children and about 9% are lone parents. About 30% are one person living alone, and within that, about 17% of all households are a single pensioner. Nearly one household in six is a pensioner on their own, which is the other side of a town where people move in and never leave.
About 47% of adults hold a degree-level qualification, about 12% have no formal qualifications and about 1% are full-time students. Marlow has no university, so the student share is close to nil, and the graduates mostly arrived already qualified. Marlow returned two members of Parliament from 1624 to 1867, which suggests the town has been producing people with opinions for a long time.
About 87% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 3% as bad or very bad. Across Buckinghamshire as a whole, the council-area rates of smoking and of deaths from preventable causes are both better than the England average. Those are county figures, so they describe the wider authority, though Marlow's own self-reported health points the same way.
Only about 121 people live in communal settings such as care homes, too few to shift any of the other shares.
The population is one of Marlow's real strengths: healthy, highly qualified, financially secure and in no hurry to move on. The only group in short supply is the young, and the house prices are the reason why.