Sway is a settled, older, well-off village, and the numbers barely bother to hide it. The typical resident is in their mid-fifties. Over eight in ten households own their home. About four in ten adults hold a degree, and the typical household brings in somewhere around £64,500 a year. This is not a place people start out in. It is a place people arrive at, usually once the hard financial yards are already behind them.
Ownership is the defining fact. Around five in six homes here are owner-occupied, which leaves renting as very much the exception rather than a route in. Private renting accounts for only about one in twelve households, and it is not hard to see why the rental market stays small when the housing is largely held by people who bought it, kept it, and have no particular reason to sell. If you are hoping to rent your way into Sway to try it before committing, the supply is thin, and the competition for what does come up reflects it. The village runs on people who have already put down roots, not people passing through on a twelve-month agreement.
The age profile follows straight from that. With a typical age in the mid-fifties, Sway skews decisively older than a place still filling up with young families would. The classic early-career, young-family bracket of twenty-five to forty-four makes up only about one in seven residents, which is a small slice for the demographic most estate agents build their patter around. This is not a village of first jobs and first flats. It is a village of second halves and settled routines, and the population pyramid is honest about which end it is heavy on.
Money tracks the same story. A typical household income of roughly £64,500 sits comfortably above the national middle, and it pairs with the degree share of about four in ten to describe a professional, largely comfortable population. Nobody is scraping into Sway on a whim. The prices and the ownership rates do their own filtering long before anyone signs anything, and the income figures are the result of that filter rather than an accident of it.
The households themselves lean quiet rather than busy. About a quarter of homes are single-person, and roughly one in five is a pensioner living alone, which tells you a good deal about the rhythm of the place during a weekday afternoon. Couples with children account for around one in six households, and lone-parent families for about one in fourteen. This is a village weighted toward small, established households rather than full, noisy ones, and the streets carry the calm that comes with it.
Sway is a comfortable, older, owner-occupier village, and it makes no apology for being exactly that. If you want neighbours who have settled, stayed and largely finished climbing, this is precisely the crowd. If you wanted youth, churn and a busy rental scene, you have taken a wrong turn somewhere back down the line.