Settled owners in their fifties, mostly, plus the people who keep the farms and the visitors running. Nearly seven in ten own their homes. Around a quarter of households are one person on their own. Incomes are modest for a place selling half-million-pound houses. This is a village where most residents arrived, stayed, and have no intention of moving again.
On tenure, the 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure here, puts owner-occupation at around 69%, with about 17% renting privately and roughly 14% in social housing. A third of homes in rented hands is higher than the owner-occupier headline suggests, and in a parish with this many holiday lets the rented third covers two very different kinds of tenancy.
The age profile is the defining fact. The median resident is 53, and only about 17% of the population falls in the 25 to 44 band that most villages rely on for working-age energy. That is not a place emptying out, but it is a place where the primary school intake and the pub trade both depend on a fairly narrow slice of the population.
Household income runs at roughly £44,000 a year gross, before tax, on the Office for National Statistics modelled estimate for the financial year to March 2023. That figure describes 2023 rather than today. Set beside the local housing market, it explains a great deal about who has been able to buy here recently and who has not.
Household make-up follows the age picture. Around 28% of households are a single person, and about 17% are a single pensioner, which is a subset of that same group rather than an addition to it. Couples with children make up roughly 19%, and lone-parent households about 8%. What that describes is a village of older solo householders and family houses in roughly equal measure, with very little in between.
On qualifications, around 35% hold a degree-level qualification and about 15% hold none at all, with full-time students at roughly 1%. That is the shape of a rural parish with a farming economy, a tourism economy and a meaningful number of incomers who brought professional careers with them, sitting side by side in the same postcodes.
Health reads well. Around 81% of residents report good or very good health, with about 5% reporting bad or very bad health. Across the Cornwall council area, which is the geography those wider health indicators use rather than the village itself, preventable mortality is similar to England as a whole and smoking prevalence, at about 12%, is also similar to England. Nothing in the health picture stands out in either direction.
The social profile is the softer side of St Buryan: an older, settled, comfortably housed population on incomes that have not kept pace with what its houses now cost, which is a quiet problem for anyone who grew up here and hoped to stay.