A working town with a university sitting on top of it. Six in ten households own their home. The typical resident is in their early thirties, which is young for Cornwall by some distance. Nearly three in ten households are a single person living alone. This is not a retirement coast, and it is not a commuter dormitory either.
On tenure, the 2021 census puts owner-occupation at about 59% of households, with about 27% renting privately and about 13% in social housing. Roughly four in ten homes are rented in total, which is a high share for a Cornish town and entirely explained by what sits up the hill.
The age profile runs younger than the county's reputation. The median age is 31, and about 23% of residents are between 25 and 44. That combination gives a town with plenty of people at the stage of life where they are working, forming households and looking at two-bedroom terraces.
Income, modelled for the wider area for the financial year to March 2023, came in at about £50,600 for a household, gross and before any tax comes off. It describes that year rather than today, and it is a modelled figure for the area rather than a survey of the street.
Household shapes vary more than a market town usually manages. About 10% of households are lone-parent households, which is the ordinary end of the picture and the one that most affects school and housing demand.
Taking the census household types together: about 29% of households are a single person living alone, of which about 12% are a pensioner living alone, so the two figures are not additive. Couples with dependent children account for about 16%. That leaves a town where one-person living is the single largest household arrangement, which is a real constraint on anyone hoping to sell a four-bedroom house here in a hurry.
On qualifications, about 32% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 11% hold none at all. The census also records about 7% as full-time students who are working or seeking work, which is a labour-market classification rather than a count of students in the town. The actual student population is far larger than that figure implies, and anyone reading it as evidence of a quiet non-student town has misread it.
Health self-reports well. About 84% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 5% as bad or very bad. At the Cornwall level, smoking prevalence and the preventable mortality rate both sit similar to England, which is the council area's standing rather than the town's own and says nothing about any individual street.
One number changes how all of this should be read. Of 11,772 residents, 1,638 live in communal establishments rather than private households, with 10,134 in ordinary homes, and residents aged 15 to 24 make up about 30% of the population. The Penryn Campus, shared between Falmouth University and the University of Exeter, is inside the boundary. Median age, tenure mix and household composition are all pulled by that, so treat the settled population as the ten thousand in houses and flats, and treat the rest as a term-time overlay that empties in summer.
Who lives here lands in the middle of the range: mostly owners, a substantial rented sector, ordinary incomes and health broadly in line with the national picture, with a student population layered over the top that makes the town feel younger than the houses do.