Sheerness is a young town where most people rent. About six in ten households rent. The typical resident is in their mid-thirties. There are slightly more lone-parent households than couples with children. Anyone expecting a retirement town will find more pushchairs on the prom than mobility scooters.
Only about 41% of households own their home. About 36% rent privately and 22% rent from a social landlord. With landlords outnumbering owner-occupiers, the letting agents have as much say over who lives on a street as the neighbours do, and tenancies turn over faster than mortgages do.
Every population figure on this page comes from the 2021 Census. The median age is about 35. About 27% of residents are between 25 and 44, the ages when people are building careers, starting families and working out whether a two-bedroom terrace will stretch to three. This is a town of people in the middle of things, not people winding down.
Gross household income, before tax, averaged about £44,000 in the financial year to March 2023. It's a modelled figure from the Office for National Statistics for that year, not what households earn today. It reflects work that pays the bills without much left over: the port, the trades and the jobs a dockyard town ends up with once the Navy has gone.
Among the town's 5,370 households, about 19% are lone parents with children and about 18% are couples with children. About 30% are one person living alone, and about 12% of households are a pensioner living alone, a group already counted within that 30%. Families make up a big part of the town, but they don't all look like the families in housebuilders' brochures, and many of the one-person households are older residents who have been here longer than the renters around them.
About 14% of adults hold a degree and about 31% have no formal qualifications. Only about 1% are full-time students. With no university in town, the student share is barely there, and the graduates who do live here mostly moved in rather than stayed on after their studies.
On income, qualifications and the other usual measures of a neighbourhood, Sheerness sits near the bottom. It's a young, working, mostly renting town, and the numbers show a place where many households are stretched.