Mostly comfortable forty-somethings who own the house. Two in three households are owner-occupiers. Nearly half the adults have a degree. One household in four is a couple with children. Walton is a town of grown-ups, with the paperwork in order.
About 64% of Walton's households own their home, outright or with a mortgage. About 20% rent privately and 13% rent from a social landlord. That leaves a rental market big enough for someone testing the town before buying, and a social-housing share that's large enough to show Walton isn't all one income bracket.
Every population figure on this page comes from the 2021 census. The median age then was 40, and about 29% of residents were aged 25 to 44. That makes it a town with a middle and both ends attached, where the school gate and the bowls club draw on the same streets. It's been a commuter town since the railway arrived in the nineteenth century, and the age profile still looks built for the morning train, even if fewer people now catch it.
The Office for National Statistics models median household income across Walton at about £75,800 before tax for the year to March 2023. That's household money, often from two earners, and it describes the town three years ago. At that level, the gap between gross and take-home pay is wide enough to cover a good part of a mortgage.
About 29% of households are one person living alone, and about 12% of all households are a pensioner living alone, a subset of that 29%. Couples with dependent children make up about 25% of households, and lone parents about 11%. The families and the people living alone take up roughly equal shares of the town's front doors, which explains why Walton has both a busy school run and a supermarket queue of one-person baskets.
About 45% of residents aged 16 and over hold a degree-level qualification, about 13% have no formal qualifications and about 2% are full-time students. With Brooklands College for further education and no university in town, there's no student quarter. The degree holders mostly earned theirs somewhere else and came back to Walton with the mortgage.
The census puts Walton's population at 27,684 people in 11,556 households, of whom only 154 live in communal settings such as care homes. That's too few to bend any of the shares above.
The people are one of Walton's real strengths. They're well educated, mostly settled into ownership and comfortable without being remote, and the town has enough renters and single-person households to stop it turning into a single type.