Salisbury has more people living alone than the cathedral-and-grammar-schools branding would lead anyone to expect. A third of households are one person. Six in ten own their homes. The typical resident is in their mid-forties. It looks like a family city from the outside, and the households politely decline to confirm it.
On tenure, about 61% of homes are owner-occupied, 19% are privately rented and 18% are socially rented. That last figure is the one that surprises visitors who have only seen the Close and assumed the whole city was built for canons. Roughly four in ten households here rent from somebody, which for a place this size is a working city rather than a heritage exhibit.
The age profile sits solidly in the middle. The typical resident is 44, and 25% of the population falls in the 25 to 44 band. This is not a student city and it is not a retirement town. It is the age range where people have already made their big decisions and are living with them.
Household income runs to about £60,000 before tax, a modelled figure describing the financial year to March 2023 rather than today. Gross is the word doing the work there: that is the number before anything is taken off it, and the mortgage arithmetic happens on what is left.
The Census of 2021 is the source for the population figures on this page, and it puts single-person households at 33%, of which single pensioners account for 16%. Those two are not additive: the pensioner figure sits inside the wider one. Couples with children make up 18% of households and lone parents 10%. A city where nearly twice as many households are one person as are a couple with children is a city whose housing demand does not match its family reputation.
On qualifications, 37% hold a degree-level qualification, 15% have none, and 2% are full-time students. That last number is the giveaway. Salisbury's higher education is a further education college campus with some degree provision and a theological college in the cathedral close, not a university with a student body in the tens of thousands, and the city feels different for it. Nobody here is complaining about noise from a student quarter, because there isn't one.
Health reads well. Around 83% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and 5% as bad or very bad. Across the wider Wiltshire local authority rather than Salisbury alone, the preventable mortality rate is better than the England benchmark and the smoking rate, at about 8%, is similar to England. Those are county-level figures against a national comparison, so treat them as the backdrop rather than a reading of this postcode.
One technical note that changes how to read all of it. Of a population of 48,749, some 919 people live in communal establishments such as halls, care homes and similar rather than in private households, so the household shares above describe the 47,830 who live in ordinary homes.
The population profile here is middling in the honest sense: comfortable rather than wealthy, settled rather than churning, and with a household mix that skews further towards people living alone than the estate agent photographs of Georgian frontages would ever admit.