Mostly older homeowners, mostly long-settled, mostly the kind of household that has worked out Selsey is the destination, not a stepping stone. The median resident is fifty-seven. Three-quarters of households own their home. A third of homes contain a single person, and about one in five is a single pensioner. The working-age twenty-five-to-forty-four bracket sits at just sixteen per cent, which is the practical reason the school photo and the buggy traffic are both lighter than in most places of comparable size.
Tenure tells the same story as the age profile. About three-quarters of households own their home outright or with a mortgage. Private renting accounts for around fifteen per cent of households, and social renting for around nine per cent. The renters who are here are largely the people running the care homes, working the cafés on the seafront, or sitting on second homes that pay for themselves over the summer. The buying market dominates, and the buying market is dominated in turn by people who arrive with cash from somewhere else.
The age profile is the single most telling fact about who lives here. The median resident is fifty-seven. The twenty-five-to-forty-four working-age bracket sits at around sixteen per cent of the population, which is a long way below what you would see in a town that depended on a commute. The skew is older across every measure: more single pensioners than couples with children, more people retired or close to it than people early in their careers, more buyers cashing out of larger homes than people cashing into smaller ones.
The typical household pulls in just under forty-one thousand pounds a year. That figure is consistent with the demographic profile: a mix of pension income, drawdown from sold equity, part-time work, and home-working. About a quarter of residents work from home, which is the practical evidence that the digital economy contributes to the local income picture even where the local labour market itself is small.
The household make-up runs from the predictable single-person and couple-only profile of a retirement-skewed town, through to a much smaller share of family households. Couples with children make up around twelve per cent of households. Lone-parent households account for about eight per cent. About a third of all households contain a single person, and about one in five is a single pensioner living alone. Overcrowding is rare here at around two per cent. The picture is older, quieter, and more spread out than a comparable inland town.
Selsey lands at three out of five for the resident profile, which is the rating's way of saying neither concentrated wealth nor concentrated deprivation. The deprivation index has shifted slightly the wrong way between the 2019 and 2025 readings, but the overall picture is a settled, mostly older, mostly content town that is not actively changing fast. Who lives here is mostly who lived here a decade ago. The new arrivals are people who looked at the price, did the maths, and decided that their late fifties was a good age to stop looking.