Rush Green is home to working-age families and homeowners in their thirties and forties, many of them stretched. About six in ten own their home. The typical resident is in their mid-thirties. One household in six is a single parent with children. It is a place of mortgages and school runs, with less slack in the budget than the price of the houses suggests.
All the population figures here come from the 2021 census, which counted about 36,400 people in Rush Green. About 60% of households own their home, about 22% rent privately and about 16% rent from the council or a housing association. Owners are the majority, though about four in ten households pay a landlord of one kind or another.
The median resident is 36, and about 32% of residents are aged 25 to 44. That is the age band that buys the three-bed, fills the primary school and spends its weekends at the soft-play centre.
The Office for National Statistics models typical household income across Rush Green at about £70,700 before tax for the financial year to March 2023, averaged over seven neighbourhoods. In most homes that is two salaries added together, and after the mortgage it goes less far than it sounds.
About 26% of households are one person living alone, and about 10% of all households are a pensioner living alone, a group counted inside that one-person share. Couples with dependent children make up about 22%, and lone parents with children about 16%. For every four couple families raising children here, there are about three single parents doing the same job alone.
About 33% of adults hold a degree or equivalent and about 20% have no formal qualifications, so the two groups are not far apart in size. Full-time students make up about 3% of residents. Barking and Dagenham College is on Dagenham Road, and having it there has not turned Rush Green into a student quarter.
About 84% of residents described their health as good or very good at the census. Across Havering, the borough's death rate from preventable causes is better than the England average, and its smoking rate, at about 8% of adults, is similar to England's. Those are borough figures and describe Havering more than this corner of it.
Rush Green is a busy, working, somewhat hard-pressed suburb, where most of the residents are holding down jobs and bringing up children on incomes with not much room to spare.