Working people in their thirties, split between a mortgage and a landlord. Just over half own their home. The typical resident is in their mid-thirties. Around four in ten have a degree. Reading is not a retirement town or a student town. It is the town in between, where people go to work and get on with it.
All the population figures here come from the 2021 census unless stated otherwise. About 55% of households own their home and about 29% rent privately, with the rest mostly in social housing. That split explains the letting boards. Plenty of the people renting in Reading are saving to buy in Reading, and plenty of the owners are the landlords.
The median age is 36, and about 32% of residents are aged 25 to 44. That is the age of the first mortgage, the first child and the first argument about the loft conversion. It shows in the queue at the soft play on a Saturday.
Modelled household income averaged about £66,400 before tax in the financial year to March 2023. That is a gross figure, three years old, describing the area rather than any one household. It is the money of dual-income couples with office jobs, which is roughly what the town looks like at eight in the morning.
Households come in all shapes. About 27% are one person living alone, and about 9% of households are a pensioner living alone, which is part of that same figure rather than extra to it. About 21% are couples with children and about 10% are lone parents. The rest are couples without children, sharers and the rest of ordinary domestic life. No single type runs the place, which is why the school gate and the late bar share a postcode.
About 39% of adults hold a degree or higher, about 15% have no qualifications, and about 3% are full-time students. That is a mix, not a hierarchy. The office jobs pull in graduates, and the town has plenty of people who got on without one.
About 86% of residents described their health as good or very good. Across the Reading local authority, the preventable death rate is similar to the England average, and so is the smoking rate, at about 9%. These are figures for the whole local authority benchmarked against England, not a measure of any one street.
About 6,548 people live in communal settings such as student halls and care homes rather than private households. Against a population of about 206,000, that is not enough to change how the other figures should be read.
Reading's population is middling in the most useful sense: working age, reasonably qualified and neither rich nor struggling. Nobody moves here to be surrounded by any one type of person, and nobody ends up that way either.