Slough is home to young working households, many of them raising children. About half own their home. The typical resident is in their mid-thirties. Couples with children make up more than a quarter of households. Slough is a town in the middle of its working life.
Of about 172,000 residents at the 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure here, about 51% of households owned their home and about 29% rented privately. Social housing accounts for about 19%. A town where half the households rent has a lot of people at the stage of saving for a deposit, and the landlords meet them early.
The median age is about 35, and about 32% of residents are aged 25 to 44. Those are the years of first jobs, first mortgages and first children. Slough has been taking in young working families since the housing estates built after the war for Londoners leaving the bombed-out capital.
The Office for National Statistics models the average household income here at about £63,000 before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That is a decent figure for a household, and in many homes it comes from two earners commuting to the trading estate or further afield. Before tax and the rent or mortgage come off, it looks comfortable.
Families shape the town. About 27% of households are couples with dependent children, and about 13% are lone parents. That is a lot of school runs, and with schools graded this well across the borough, a good share of these families planned their move around them.
About 23% of households are one person living alone, and about 8% are a pensioner living alone, a group counted within the one-person households, not on top of them. For a town this size, that is a modest number of people living alone, which matches how young it is. Older people are present, but the town is not built around them.
About 35% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 20% have no qualifications and about 2% are full-time students. The mix is broad, with graduates working in the offices on the trading estate and plenty of people who went straight into work. The University of West London's planned Slough campus never materialised and the old site was sold for housing, so most of the town's school-leavers who go to university move away to do it.
About 86% of residents describe their health as good or very good. Across the Slough council area, preventable deaths run at about the England rate, and smoking is lower than in England, at about 7% of adults. These are borough-wide figures compared with England, not measures of any one neighbourhood. For a young town, the healthy self-reports are about what would be expected.
Slough's population is middling on the measures that matter. It is young, working, decently paid and mixed in its qualifications, with little at either extreme.