Owners, mostly, at an age where the mortgage is a memory rather than a monthly event. Three-quarters own their homes. The median resident is in their early fifties. More than a quarter of households are one person living on their own. Somerton is not a town in transition. It is a town that finished transitioning a while ago and has no plans to start again.
Every population figure here comes from the Census 2021 count for the Somerton area, which covers the town and the villages around it. On tenure, about 76% of households own their home, about 12% rent privately and about 11% rent from a social landlord. An owner-occupier share that high changes the texture of a place: people stay, houses come up rarely, and the person three doors down has probably watched two sets of neighbours arrive and leave.
The age profile follows from that. The median resident is 53, and only about 18% of the population is aged 25 to 44. The years when people are chasing promotions, changing cities and having babies are the years this area is thinnest on, which is not a criticism so much as an explanation of why the pub is quiet on a Wednesday and the garden centre is not.
Money is comfortable rather than plush. The modelled median household income for the area was about £56,400 gross, before any tax comes off, for the financial year to March 2023, which works out at roughly £42,100 net on the same modelling. That describes an income three years before the house prices anyone is looking at today, so treat it as the shape of local earnings rather than a current pay slip.
Household make-up is where the character sits. About 28% of households are a single person, and about 17% are a pensioner living alone, that second figure being part of the first rather than an addition to it. Couples with children account for about 16% of households and lone parents about 8%. Put plainly, more homes here contain one person over retirement age than contain a couple raising children, and any buyer picturing a street full of trampolines should walk it on a school afternoon first.
On qualifications, about 35% of adults hold a degree-level qualification and about 15% hold none at all, with full-time students at about 2%. That is a varied picture rather than a uniform one: farming, trades and long-established local families alongside professionals who arrived with a laptop and a view.
Health reads well. About 81% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 5% describe it as bad or very bad. Across Somerset as a whole, measured against England, the preventable mortality rate is better and adult smoking is similar. Those two are county-level measures with an England benchmark rather than anything specific to this town, and they describe services, ages and circumstances across a large area.
The people here are ordinary in the least insulting sense of the word: middling incomes, good health, high ownership, and an age profile tilted well past the school run. It suits anyone who wants neighbours who intend to stay, and it will feel thin to anyone in their thirties hoping to find a crowd of people at the same stage of life.