Settled homeowners in their early forties, mostly. Eight in ten own their home. The typical resident is about 42. Students are close to invisible. Woodley is where the moving boxes go up into the loft and never come back down.
Ownership is the town's default setting. About 79% of households own their home, about 12% rent privately and about 8% rent from a social landlord. Landlords are a side-show here, and the lettings board on a Woodley street is rarer than the extension skip.
The median age is about 42, and about 26% of residents are aged 25 to 44. That puts the centre of gravity in the years of mortgages, school runs and arguments about loft ladders, with the town's first-time-buyer contingent looking slim beside the families who arrived a decade ago and stayed.
Modelled household income averaged about £73,500 before tax in the financial year to March 2023. That is a gross figure for households, not individuals, and it describes that year rather than today. It explains the tidy drives more than any estate agent's adjectives could.
The household mix comes from the 2021 Census, as do all the population figures on this page. About 25% of households are couples with children, and about 9% are lone parents. About 24% of households are one person living alone, and within that, about 13% of all households are a single pensioner living alone. The quiet bungalow at the end of the close usually has a long-standing resident who knows exactly whose car should not be parked outside it.
On qualifications, about 39% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 13% have no formal qualifications and only about 2% are full-time students. The mix reads like a town of people who finished their education some time ago and now mostly talk about their children's.
Self-reported health is strong: about 86% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and about 3% as bad or very bad. Across the Wokingham local authority, a wider area than Woodley, preventable deaths are better than the England benchmark, and smoking, at about 7% of adults, is also better than the England figure. Those are council-wide numbers, not Woodley's own, but they sit comfortably alongside it.
Almost everyone lives in a private household, with only nine people counted in communal settings such as care homes, so the shares above describe the town as it is.
Woodley's community is one of its real strengths: settled, comfortable and healthy, a town full of people who picked it on purpose and have shown no sign of changing their minds.