Staplehurst is mostly settled homeowners in middle age who have stopped moving house. Three in four households own their home. The typical resident is in their mid-forties. About a quarter of households are couples with children. It's a village of people who have already won the housing game and put the board away.
About 76% of households own their home. Private renting makes up about 14% and social renting about 7%. Most of Staplehurst's letting agents are handling one house at a time, and the landlord class here is mostly one person with an inherited semi.
The median age is about 45, and about 23% of residents are aged between 25 and 44. That's the profile of a place people arrive in with a family and a mortgage, not a place where people start out. Twenty-somethings grow up here, leave for somewhere with a nightclub, and some come back fifteen years later with a car seat.
Gross household income, before tax, averaged about £61,600 in the financial year to March 2023, from the Office for National Statistics' modelled estimate for the area. That describes a village where two earners are normal and the mortgage is manageable. It also describes a village where a single salary is doing everything, and feels it.
At the 2021 Census, which is the source for every population figure on this page, about 6,700 people lived in Staplehurst across about 2,670 households. That's big for a village, small for a town, and just the size where everyone knows the name of the person who objects to every planning application.
About 23% of households are couples with dependent children, and about 10% are lone parents. About 22% are one person living alone, and just over half of those, about 12% of all households, are a pensioner living on their own. So Staplehurst is part family village and part quiet retirement. The school gate and the bowls club each have plenty of members.
About 32% of adults hold a degree-level qualification, about 15% have no formal qualifications, and only about 2% are full-time students. That makes for a mix of graduates, tradespeople and long-standing locals, with almost no student life, which suits a village with no university and nowhere open late.
About 150 residents live in care homes and other communal settings rather than private households. That's too few to skew the rest of the figures, but it's a reminder that some of the older population here is being looked after rather than living alone.
The mix of people in Staplehurst is middling: comfortable, settled and ordinary. It's the kind of neighbourhood that won't surprise you, and most of the people who buy here are counting on that.