Pimlico is home to renters, single people and graduates, and very few of them own the walls they live in. About three in four households rent. Nearly half live alone. More than half the adults have a degree. Families with children are thin on the ground, and the stucco doorways are full of single names on the buzzers.
Only about 25% of Pimlico's households own their home. The rest divide almost evenly: about 36% rent privately and about 38% rent from a council or housing association. That even split gives Pimlico two sets of long-term neighbours, the private tenants who come and go with their contracts and the social tenants who have often been here far longer than any of them. Owner-occupiers are the smallest group in a neighbourhood built for one family to a house.
The median age at the 2021 Census was 37, and about 36% of residents were aged 25 to 44. That's a grown-up profile for central London. There are few students, and the twenty-somethings who share flats tend to settle somewhere cheaper further out. Pimlico gets them after their first promotion.
The Office for National Statistics models average household income here at about £73,450 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across the local areas that make up Pimlico. That's a modelled average over a mix of incomes, and it blends the private flats with the social housing two streets away. The renters paying central-London rents and the tenants on long-standing council tenancies both count towards it.
The 2021 Census, the source for every population figure on this page, found about 45% of Pimlico's households were a single person, and about 12% were single pensioners living alone, a group already counted inside that 45%. Couples with dependent children made up about 10% of households, and lone parents another 10%. Plenty of Pimlico's tall terraces now hold a one-bed flat on every floor, with one name on each buzzer, and the families the houses were built for are long gone.
About 57% of residents hold a degree, about 14% have no formal qualifications, and only about 2% are full-time students. The graduates and the people who left school without exams share the same squares and often the same buildings, and Pimlico is unusual in having a large share of both.
About 83% of residents described their health as good or very good at the 2021 Census. Across Westminster as a whole, preventable deaths run at a rate better than the England average, and the share of adults who smoke, about 14%, is similar to England's. Those borough figures cover all of Westminster, and the Census figure is Pimlico's own.
Pimlico's population is an even mix of single professionals, long-term social tenants and a small minority of owners, which comes out average overall. Very few people here own their home, raise children in it, or plan to stay longer than the lease.