Ottery St Mary is owned rather than rented, and settled rather than passed through. Most households own the roof over them. The typical resident is in their late forties. Around a fifth of households are couples with children. Nobody is moving here to see what happens next, and the numbers make that unusually obvious.
Every population figure here comes from the 2021 Census. On tenure, about 70% of households own their home, about 16% rent privately and about 11% rent from a social landlord. That is a town where buying is the default and renting is the exception, which is pleasant if you already own and less pleasant if you are trying to find something to rent in a market this thin.
The age profile follows. The median resident is 47, and about 20% of people fall in the 25 to 44 band. The early-career bracket is the quietest part of the pyramid, which is what happens in a town with no station and a stock of family houses. People tend to arrive here once they have stopped changing jobs every eighteen months.
On money, modelled household income for the area came to about £58,300 gross before tax, and about £43,100 after tax, describing the financial year to March 2023 rather than today. That is a comfortable middle rather than an affluent one, and it goes further here than the same figure would on the coast.
Families are a real presence rather than a marketing claim. About 21% of households are couples with children and about 10% are lone-parent households. Between them that is a decent share of the town organised around school terms, which explains why the place empties out in August and fills up again with people complaining about parking near the school gates.
At the other end, about 29% of households are single-person, and about 16% are single pensioners, a group that sits inside that single-person figure rather than alongside it. Adding the two together would produce a number that describes nobody. What it means in practice is that a large slice of the housing stock is occupied by one person, often an older one, and that has more effect on when houses come to market than any price index does.
On qualifications, about 35% of residents hold a degree, about 14% have no formal qualifications and about 2% are full-time students. That is a mixed working population rather than a graduate enclave, which is worth saying because the conservation area and the listed frontages lead people to expect something more uniformly professional than the town actually is.
Only 31 residents live in communal establishments rather than private households, so the shares above describe essentially the whole town rather than a filtered version of it.
The population here is one of Ottery's quieter strengths: settled, mixed in age, mostly owner-occupied, with enough families to keep the schools and the shops honest. If you want a town where your neighbours will still be your neighbours in ten years, the census has already answered the question.