Surbiton is mostly graduates in their thirties who have settled down. Most households own their home. A third rent privately. More than half the adults have a degree. Surbiton is where graduates end up once sharing a flat stops being fun.
About 58% of Surbiton's households own their home, about 33% rent privately and about 9% rent from a council or housing association. That's a solid ownership majority with a large rented minority alongside it, a split that follows the housing: owners in the houses, renters spread across the flats. In the stairwell of an old villa converted into flats, owners and tenants are often neighbours.
The typical Surbiton resident is 38, and about 35% of people are between 25 and 44. Surbiton is where people live through the working-and-raising-children years, and many arrive as those years are starting.
The Office for National Statistics models typical gross household income in Surbiton at about £86,500 before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That's a modelled average across the area, worked out for a year now gone. It's a comfortable figure for a couple both working professional jobs. It's still not enough to make the house prices here feel easy.
All the population figures on this page come from the 2021 census, which counted 37,176 people in Surbiton. About 31% of households are one person living alone, and about 10% are a pensioner living alone, a group that sits within that 31% rather than adding to it. About 22% of households are couples with dependent children and about 8% are lone parents. The single households are mostly in the flats and the families in the houses, and the move from one to the other is the most common move people make in Surbiton.
About 56% of adults have a degree, about 11% have no formal qualifications and about 3% are full-time students. With no university in town, there's no big September arrival of students. The degrees came from elsewhere and followed the jobs and the trains to Surbiton.
About 88% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 3% as bad or very bad. For Kingston upon Thames as a whole, the borough's preventable death rate is better than England's, and its smoking rate, at about 8%, is similar to England's. Those are borough figures compared against the national benchmark, and they describe Kingston as much as Surbiton.
About 841 people live in communal settings such as care homes, a small number next to the population as a whole that doesn't change the picture.
Surbiton's population is one of its strengths: well qualified, healthy and mostly employed. Its people tend to be in the busy middle of life, with careers, mortgages and children all on the go.