Owners, mostly, and people who are not going anywhere. Around two-thirds of homes are owner-occupied. The median resident is in their mid-forties. A third of households are one person living alone. Renting exists here in both flavours, private and social, in roughly equal measure, which is a genuinely unusual balance for a small English town. Nobody moves to Wellington for the scene, and the town has never once claimed otherwise.
On tenure, Census 2021 put around 65% of households in owner occupation, around 16% renting privately and around 17% renting from a social landlord. That social share matters: it is the difference between a market town that still houses a range of incomes and a market town that has quietly priced out everyone who works in it. Wellington is still the first kind.
The age profile is settled without being retired. The median resident is 45, and around 23% of the population is aged between 25 and 44. That is enough working-age adults to keep the schools full and the mills' successor industries staffed, and not enough to make anyone mistake the high street for a nightlife destination.
Household income runs at around £50,100 a year, gross, before any tax comes off. That figure is modelled for the area across the financial year to March 2023, so it describes that year rather than this one, and it covers the whole household rather than any individual in it. Two earners doing ordinary jobs is what it looks like on the ground.
The census household make-up is where the town's real shape shows. Around 32% of households are a single person, and around 17% are a pensioner living alone, which is a subset of that figure rather than an addition to it. Around 18% are a couple with dependent children and around 10% are a lone parent with them. Every population figure on this page comes from Census 2021, which is the last time anyone counted properly.
Qualifications sit either side of the middle. Around 30% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and around 17% hold none at all, with full-time students at around 2%. That spread is what a town with a manufacturing base and a professional commuter fringe looks like on paper, and it is a description of the population rather than a ranking of it.
Health reads well. Around 81% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and around 5% as bad or very bad. At the wider Somerset council level, preventable mortality comes in better than the England benchmark and adult smoking is similar to it. Those two are county figures with an England comparison attached, not Wellington's own, and they describe services and circumstances rather than the character of anyone living here.
For completeness, 293 people in the area live in communal establishments rather than private households, out of a total population of 14,522. That is small enough not to distort any of the household shares above, which is not true of every town with a large care sector.
Middling on the measures this page uses, and comfortable in a way the measures do not capture. Wellington is a town of owner-occupiers in their forties, a substantial number of people living alone, and enough social housing to keep the place recognisably itself.