Tilbury is a young, working town where most households rent and money is tighter than across much of England. Six in ten households rent, and social landlords house more of them than private ones. The typical resident is in their early thirties. One household in five is a single parent with children. The town was built to house people who work, and it still mostly does.
The 2021 census, the source for every population figure on this page, counted 14,187 people in Tilbury. About 40% of households own their home, about 22% rent privately and about 38% rent from a social landlord. Tilbury was put up at speed in the late nineteenth century to house the workers who built the docks, and renting has been the normal arrangement ever since.
The median age is 33, and about 30% of residents are between 25 and 44. That is a town in the years of first jobs, young children and second-hand cars, with fewer retirees than the riverside villages around it.
Household income across the area averaged about £50,000 a year before tax in the financial year to March 2023, a figure the Office for National Statistics models for the wider neighbourhood. After tax, the same modelling puts it at about £42,000. The lender sizing up a mortgage here will be working from the second of those.
The census counted 4,983 households, and about 11% of them are overcrowded, short of at least one bedroom for the people living in them. About 5% of residents were unemployed. On the government's deprivation index, Tilbury's neighbourhoods sit on average in the more deprived fifth to quarter of England, both in 2019 and in the latest 2025 edition, so the position has held steady.
By household type, about 24% are one person living alone, and about 9% of all households are a pensioner living alone, part of that same group. Couples with children make up about 22%, and lone parents with children about 21%. The school gate here is evenly split between two-parent and one-parent households.
About 25% of residents aged 16 and over hold a degree-level qualification, while about 28% have no formal qualifications, and only about 3% are full-time students. The town has no university, and the young adults here are mostly working.
About 82% of residents described their health as good or very good at the census, with about 6% reporting bad or very bad health. Across Thurrock as a whole, the council-area smoking rate is about 14%, similar to England's, and the borough's rate of preventable deaths is also rated similar to the national figure.
Tilbury scores low on the usual measures of wealth and qualifications, and the households here have less to fall back on than in most of the borough. What it has instead is a young, working population in a town that was built for exactly that.