North Weald Bassett is mostly homeowners in their forties and older. Seven in ten own their home. The typical resident is in their mid-forties. Students barely register. Families on the school run and pensioners living alone share the same roads.
The 2021 census, the source for every population figure on this page, counted 5,148 people in 2,119 households. About 72% of households own their home. About 10% rent privately and about 16% rent from a social landlord, so the village has more council and housing association tenants than private ones. Private renting is the smallest slice here, behind both owning and social housing.
The median resident is 46. People aged 25 to 44, the years when most people rent, change jobs and have small children, make up about 22% of the population. The village has the age profile of people who have stopped renting and started gardening.
The Office for National Statistics models average household income across the village's statistical areas at about £65,400 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That is a gross figure averaged over two neighbourhood areas, and it is three years old. In a village where one household in six is a pensioner living alone, it also takes in plenty of homes where the earning was done some time ago.
Households here come in many forms. About 19% are couples with dependent children, and about 12% are lone parents. About 28% are one person living alone.
That last group is mostly older people. About 16% of all households are a single pensioner, a subset of the 28% living alone. Together with the families, that gives a village whose streets have both a school run and a doctor's appointment to fit around.
Qualifications are spread fairly evenly. About 24% of residents aged 16 and over hold a degree-level qualification, and about 23% have no formal qualifications at all. Full-time students make up about 1% of the population. The graduates and those who left school with no qualifications are almost level, and both have the same vote at a parish council that meets in the county library.
North Weald Bassett's residents are a middling, mixed group, mostly settled homeowners, with families and older people living alone in roughly even numbers. Young renters and students are the ones largely missing.