Totnes is lived in by people who chose it deliberately, mostly at the stage of life when choosing deliberately gets expensive. The median resident is 50. Around six in ten own their home. More than a third of households contain exactly one person. For a town with a reputation for reinvention, the people in it read as settled rather than searching.
About 59% of households own their home and about 21% rent privately. Ownership is the default without being the whole story, and the private rented share is large enough that the town is not a closed circle of people who got in early and pulled the ladder up behind them.
The age profile is the part that surprises visitors. The median resident is 50, and about 21% of residents sit in the 25 to 44 band, the age range that normally fills the rented flats, the nurseries and the kitchens. The town works perfectly well with that shape. It does mean the group doing most of the working and most of the renting is thinner on the ground than the market-day crowd suggests.
Median household income across the area came to about £53,000 before tax in the financial year to March 2023, modelled by the Office for National Statistics rather than counted from anybody's payslip, with about £41,000 of that left after tax. Comfortable rather than rich, and describing a year that is already well behind us.
On the 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure on this page, about 37% of households are a single person, and about 20% are a pensioner living alone, which sits inside that first figure rather than adding to it. Close to two in five front doors here open onto one person's arrangements, which shapes everything from the size of the flats to how loud the town is on a Sunday.
Families are the smaller share of the picture. About 15% of households are a couple with children and about 10% are a lone parent. This is a place organised more around people living singly or in pairs than around the school run, worth knowing if part of the appeal was a street full of other parents.
About 46% of adults hold a degree-level qualification and about 13% hold none at all. Full-time students account for about 1% of residents, so the qualified population is a resident one rather than a transient one. The town is well educated and it is emphatically not a campus. Almost everyone lives in a private household, with 94 residents in communal establishments, too few to shift any of the shares above.
The population is neither the retirement enclave the median age hints at nor the counterculture colony the town's reputation promises, and settles somewhere fairly ordinary between the two: mostly owners, a great many households of one, well qualified, moderately paid. For a place that trades on being unlike anywhere else, who actually lives here is the least eccentric thing about it.