Teignmouth is mostly owned, mostly settled and a good deal older than the deckchairs suggest. Seven in ten households own their home. More than a third are one person living alone. The typical resident is in their early fifties. The result is a town with a full daytime population, which is a different animal from a resort that fills in August and goes to sleep in October.
On the 2021 census, which is the source for the population figures on this page, 69% of households own their home outright or with a mortgage and 21% rent privately, with renting of all kinds accounting for 30%. Ownership at that level describes a town that has largely finished changing hands, and the rental share sits mostly in the flats rather than spread evenly across the streets.
The median age is 52, which no tourist board has ever printed on a poster. People aged 25 to 44 make up 19% of residents, so the town has a working-age core rather than a purely retired one, and it is smaller than the same slice would be in a city.
Household income for the area was modelled at about £48,000 gross, before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That is a figure describing that year rather than this one, and it is a modelled estimate for the wider area rather than a payslip anyone here has seen.
Household make-up is where the town's character shows most clearly. Some 36% of households are a single person, and 19% of all households are a pensioner living alone, that second group being part of the first rather than an addition to it. Couples with children account for 13% and lone parent households for 9%. A town where one in eight households has children in it is a town where the schools are good and the school run is short, and where "family town" is a phrase to use with some care.
Education splits three ways and refuses to settle. Around 33% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, 16% hold none at all, and 1% are full-time students. Qualifications here are spread across the full range rather than clustered at either end, and the low student share means the town's evening noise is generated by people who have to work in the morning.
Of the 15,515 residents, 246 live in communal establishments such as care homes rather than private households, which is small enough that it does not shift any of the shares above.
The people here land in the middle of the national range, which is the honest verdict: comfortable rather than wealthy, settled rather than stuck, older than average without being a retirement colony, and varied enough that nobody in the queue at the bakery is having quite the same week as the person in front of them.