Mayfair is home to a small, highly educated, mostly renting population, and a lot of it lives alone. Most people rent. The typical resident is in their late thirties. Two in three hold a degree. Families with children are thin on the ground.
The 2021 Census, the source for every population figure on this page, counted 7,819 residents. About 30% of households own their home, and about 55% rent privately. Another 15% or so rent from the council or a housing association, which surprises people who assume the district's only tenants are on company lets. In a district where the top council-tax band is the most common one, roughly one household in seven is in social housing.
The typical resident is 39, and about 35% of residents are aged 25 to 44. That makes Mayfair a working-age district more than a retirement one, though not the young district its nightlife reputation might suggest.
Household income across the surrounding area averaged about £86,700 a year before tax in the financial year to March 2023, an Office for National Statistics model, and about £58,700 once tax was taken off. Both are comfortable figures. Neither comes close to buying a home on the streets they describe, which is why so few of the people living here own.
The households themselves are small. About 51% are one person living alone, and within that about 10% of all households are a pensioner on their own. Couples with dependent children make up about 8% of households, and lone parents about 5%. Townhouses built for a family, its relatives and its staff now mostly hold one adult per front door, after being divided into flats along the way.
This is a heavily qualified population. About 63% of adults hold a degree or higher, about 9% have no formal qualifications, and full-time students make up about 2% of residents. With no campus inside the district and rents at these levels, the September duvet migration happens somewhere else.
People here report good health. About 89% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 3% as bad or very bad. In Westminster as a whole, preventable deaths run at a rate the official England benchmark rates as better than the national figure, and smoking, at about 14% of adults, is similar to England's. Those comparisons describe the borough, and they set the backdrop for Mayfair rather than measuring it.
The census also counts 390 people living in communal establishments, the category covering halls, care homes and similar shared accommodation, outside private households altogether. In a population this small that is a visible group, and it nudges some of the shares above, since everyone in communal living is left out of the household figures while still counting as a resident.
Mayfair's residents are a well-educated, healthy, mostly single and mostly renting population, a favourable picture overall, held by far fewer people than the district's fame implies.