Mostly settled professionals with a mortgage and a laptop. About two in three households own their home. Nearly half the adults have a degree. The typical resident is just under forty. Woking isn't a young town or an old one. It's a mid-career one.
At the 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure on this page, about 64% of households owned their home. About 23% rented privately and 12% rented from a social landlord. Owners are firmly in the majority, but a third renting means the town isn't a closed shop. There's room for people still saving for a deposit, and the landlords letting to them have noticed too.
The median age is about 39, and about 30% of residents are between 25 and 44. That's the age of career moves, first children and arguments about whose turn it is to do the nursery run. There's no sign here of a retirement town or a student town. The middle of life is the default setting.
Gross household income, before tax, averaged about £75,800 a year across the area in the financial year to March 2023, as modelled by the Office for National Statistics. That figure is a few years old and describes that year, not today. It's still a household income for people who read the price list at the garden centre and pay it anyway.
About 24% of households are couples with dependent children, and about 9% are lone parents. Family life is a big part of the town but not all of it, so a street here is as likely to hold a young couple in a flat as a family with a trampoline.
Living alone is the other large group. About 27% of households are one person, and that includes the 11% who are single pensioners living alone. Those two figures overlap: the pensioners are part of the one-person total, not in addition to it. So beside the families there's a real population of people with only their own opinion on the heating.
About 45% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 13% have no qualifications, and about 2% are full-time students. That's a mixed workforce with a strong graduate share. The low student figure matters too: Woking has no university crowd, which is why nobody here complains about student houses.
About 490 people live in communal settings such as care homes rather than private households. Against a population of nearly 80,000, that's too small to change any of the shares above.
Woking's residents are one of its strengths: mostly homeowners, well qualified and comfortably off, with enough renters and single households to keep it from becoming one type of person.