Rustington is a village of homeowners, downsizers, and people whose commuting years are behind them. The median resident is 56. Around four in five households own their home. Household income sits around £52,000 a year. Nearly a quarter of households are a single pensioner living alone. Fewer than one in six residents falls in the prime working-age band. It is a coastal village that runs on the demographic buyers expect to find on a coastal village, and does not apologise for it.
Tenure is where Rustington's stability shows. Around four in five households own the home they live in. About one in eight rents privately. About one in fourteen rents from a social landlord. The renting share is small and skews to smaller households at the entry end of the market. The rental market that does exist is thin, because the owner-occupiers are not moving, and the tiny slice of stock that turns over each year is what a rental market has to be built from. A one-bed flat here, a two-bed maisonette there, the occasional whole-house let above a shop. Rustington was not designed for renters, and does not pretend to be.
The age profile is what a coastal downsizer village produces. The median resident is 56. About one in six residents sits in the prime working-age band of 25 to 44. That is a small share and it is small for a reason. Young adults leaving school here mostly leave the village to work or study, and few return until they are old enough to be the ones downsizing back in.
Household income at the median sits around £52,000 a year. Comfortable-professional territory, not City-money territory. The share of adults with a degree runs at around 28 percent, which is a middling result on a national scale. The share with no qualifications runs at around 19 percent. Unemployment sits at under 2 percent, which is close to the floor of what the labour market can produce. In a village where four in five households own their home, the income figure is only part of the wealth picture. The larger part sits in the deeds.
Household composition sits at coastal-village equilibrium. About a third of households are a single person living alone. Nearly a quarter of the total are specifically a single pensioner. About one in seven households are couples with children. About one in fourteen are lone parents. Households with children together account for around one in five of the total, and single-person households outnumber them substantially. The overall pattern is fewer children per home, more homes with one person, and a school-age cohort that does not swell above what the village primary can absorb.
Four out of five on the rating for who lives here, which reflects a stable, comfortable, unspectacular village. Rustington is where people choose to end up, not where they wash up, and every number on the demographic dashboard says so.