Owners, mostly, and mostly not young. Almost all homes here are owned rather than rented. The typical resident is nearer sixty than fifty. Close to four in ten households are one person living alone. Barely one household in ten is a couple with children. This is a town of people who have already arrived somewhere, not a town people are passing through on the way up.
About 71% of households own their home and about 10% rent privately. Ownership at that level is the structural fact underneath everything else here. It decides who can move in, and it decides how seldom anybody moves out.
The median age is 59, and about 16% of residents fall in the 25 to 44 band. That is the age group which fills primary schools, staffs the shops and makes a noise on a Friday night, and in Salcombe it is the thinnest slice of the town.
Modelled household income for the area came to about £51,000 gross, before tax, in the financial year to March 2023. That describes a year already some way behind us, and it describes what people earn rather than what people have. In a town where most residents own the roof outright, those are two entirely separate accounts.
Households with children are a small group. About 10% are a couple with children and about 5% are a lone parent household. Between them, that is the whole of the town's family-with-children population, which explains a good deal about how quiet a weekday morning sounds.
Census 2021, the source for every population figure on this page, records about 38% of households as one person living alone. About 21% are a single pensioner, and that sits inside the one-person group rather than alongside it, so the two are never added together. A town where more than a third of front doors open onto one person is a quiet town by construction, and quiet is exactly what most of them moved here to buy.
About 38% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 14% hold none at all, and about 1% are full-time students. That is a genuine spread rather than a single professional monoculture, though the near-total absence of students is the clearest signal that nothing in this town has been organised around anybody under twenty-five for a very long time.
As a population, Salcombe sits somewhere unremarkable: comfortable, settled, weighted heavily toward people who bought in and stopped looking. Whether that registers as peace or as a very early night depends mostly on which side of the median age you are reading from.