Wantage is a town of working households, with owners, families and a fair number of people living alone. Two-thirds own their home. The typical resident is in their early forties. Household incomes are comfortable. The town is busy with people who arrived to stay.
Every population figure on this page comes from the 2021 Census unless it says otherwise. About 66% of Wantage households own their home, about 14% rent privately and about 16% rent from a council or housing association. Social renting edges out private renting, so a Wantage tenant is slightly more likely to have a housing association as a landlord than a person with a buy-to-let portfolio.
The median resident is 42, and about 26% of people are aged 25 to 44. That is a town with its career years well represented but not dominant, old enough to remember when Grove was a separate village and young enough to still be in the middle of the mortgage.
The Office for National Statistics models typical household income in Wantage at about £70,400 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. That is two-earner money for the most part, enough to live within sight of the racing stables on the Downs and nowhere near enough to keep a horse in one.
Lone parents head about 9% of Wantage households.
The wider household mix is spread fairly evenly. About 31% of households are one person living alone, and within that, about 14% of all households are a single pensioner. Couples with dependent children make up about 20%. A town of family semis turns out to hold nearly as many people living on their own as couples raising children, and the pensioners among them are a sizeable share of the quiet on any given afternoon.
About 39% of Wantage residents hold a degree or equivalent, about 14% have no formal qualifications and about 2% are full-time students. Both ends of the qualifications range are well represented, and the near absence of students is the mark of a town with no university, where the young leave for higher education and some of them come back later with children and a deposit.
Wantage is home to a broad, comfortable and largely working population that owns its houses and stays put, and that stability is one of the town's strengths.