Settled homeowners in their forties, with money and a spare room. Seven in ten households own their home. The typical resident is mid-forties. Four in ten adults have a degree. Oxted is where people arrive, buy, and stop house-hunting for good.
Ownership runs the town. The 2021 Census, the source for every population figure here, found about 72% of households owning their home. About 12% rent privately and the rest mostly rent from social landlords. With the private rental sector that small, the landlord at the barbecue is the exception.
The typical Oxted resident is 44. People aged 25 to 44 make up about 23% of the population, so the young professionals are present but outnumbered. They tend to be the ones with the newest buggy and the oldest car.
Money is steady. Office for National Statistics modelling put gross household income, before tax, at around £77,600 in the financial year to March 2023. That describes the area three years ago, not this morning. It's comfortable money, the kind that funds a loft conversion rather than a yacht.
Households divide into a few recognisable shapes. Couples with dependent children make up about 25% of households. Single-person households account for about 26%, and within that, pensioners living alone are about 15% of all households. Lone-parent households make up about 9%. So it's a family town with a sizeable quieter side: the school run and the solo retiree share the same street, and both are up early.
On qualifications, about 43% of adults hold a degree or equivalent and about 13% have no formal qualifications. Full-time students are about 2% of residents, which is what happens in a town with a sixth form and no university. The students who grew up here tend to reappear a decade later with a mortgage application.
Of the 12,833 people counted in Oxted, 217 live in communal settings such as care homes rather than private households. That's too few to skew any of the shares above.
The people are one of Oxted's stronger points: established, well-qualified and comfortably off. The town suits people who come to stay, and the census says most of its residents have done exactly that.