Palmers Green is lived in by working-age owners and a large minority of renters, in roughly the proportions of a suburb that never quite chose a type. A little under six in ten own their home. A third rent privately. The typical resident is in their late thirties. Graduates and people with no qualifications at all live on the same streets.
The 2021 Census, the source for every population figure on this page, counted 37,710 people in 14,008 households. About 57% of households own their home, about 33% rent privately and about 9% rent from a council or housing association. Owners hold the majority, though by a narrower margin than a street of Edwardian semis might suggest, and a third of the doors on any given road open onto a tenancy.
The median age is 39, and about 31% of residents are aged 25 to 44. At 39, the typical resident here is old enough to have a mortgage and young enough to still be cross about the rate on it.
The Office for National Statistics models gross household income at about £74,000 for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across the area and measured before tax. That is a household figure, often made up of two salaries, and the tax and the mortgage come out of it before anyone sees it. Before tax is the important bit of that sentence.
Households here come in every shape. About 20% are couples with dependent children, and about 13% are lone parents with children. Lone parents make up a bigger share of the school run here than a suburb of this price would lead most people to expect.
About 26% of households are one person living alone, and about 10% are pensioners living alone, who are part of that 26%. More households here hold one person than hold a couple with children, and that matches how much of the housing stock is flats.
About 42% of adults hold a degree or higher, about 21% have no qualifications at all, and only about 2% are full-time students. The graduates and the people who left school with nothing share the same streets here, and no university is shaping the age profile.
In the census, about 85% of residents described their own health as good or very good. Across the London Borough of Enfield, the rate of deaths from preventable causes is better than the England average, and smoking, at about 14% of adults, is similar to the national figure. Those are borough-wide measures and say nothing about any one household.
Palmers Green is a varied neighbourhood: comfortable on paper and stretched in places, with as many households getting by on one income as on two. It does less well here than the house prices suggest.