Taunton is owned, middle-aged and comfortable in a way it does not draw attention to. About six in ten households own their homes. The typical resident is in their forties. A third of households are one person living on their own. Not a dormitory, not a retirement town, and not putting much effort into being mistaken for either.
Tenure runs about 59% owner-occupied, with roughly 21% renting privately and about 18% renting from a social landlord. That second pair is the interesting part, because private and social renting sit close enough together that the rental market here is not one market with one type of tenant. Anyone picturing a town of owners with a thin fringe of renters has the shape wrong by a considerable margin.
The median age is 42, and about 26% of residents are between 25 and 44. That is a town at the age where people have stopped auditioning cities and started caring about parking, garden size and how far the nearest surgery is. It is neither the young profile of a university town nor the older one of a coastal retirement stretch.
Household income across the area was modelled at about £52,450 before tax for the financial year to March 2023, with the equivalent after-tax figure around £40,057. Both describe that year rather than this one, and both are modelled averages for the area rather than a payslip anyone would recognise as their own. The gross number is the one worth holding onto when weighing what housing here costs.
The 2021 census, which is the source for the population figures on this page, puts about 35% of households as single-person, of which about 16% are pensioners living alone. Couples with dependent children make up about 18%, and lone parents about 10%. More households here contain one person than contain a couple with children, which is the quiet fact that reshapes what a town like this actually needs to build.
On qualifications, about 32% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and about 16% hold none at all, with full-time students accounting for about 2%. That student share tells you there is no university quarter distorting the town's rhythm, and the two larger figures together describe a working population that spans professional offices and skilled trades without either one running the place.
Health self-reports are decent. About 81% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 5% as bad or very bad. Across the Somerset local authority, which is a wider geography than this town, the preventable mortality rate is rated better than England, and adult smoking sits at about 11%, rated similar to England. Those are county-level standings against a national benchmark, not a verdict on any street here.
One technical point worth knowing when reading all of the above: of the 65,048 people counted, about 1,586 live in communal establishments such as care homes and halls rather than private households. It is a small enough share that the household figures hold, but it is why the population count and the household count never quite line up.
Taunton's population is ordinary in the way most of England is ordinary, and the town is unbothered by that. A largely owner-occupied, middle-aged, middling-income place with more people living alone than the brochure version of a market town would suggest, and enough renting households to keep it from becoming a museum of itself.