Yarnton is lived in by owner-occupiers in their forties and older, comfortably off and staying put. Seven in ten own their home. Pensioners living alone and families with children make up similar shares. Almost nobody is a student. For a village on Oxford's doorstep, it has very little of Oxford's churn.
Every figure on this page comes from the 2021 census unless it says otherwise. About 69% of Yarnton's households own their home, about 11% rent privately and about 14% rent from a social landlord. The private rental market is the smallest of the three. A buyer looking for a street where the neighbours turn over every September has come to the wrong village.
The median age is 43, and about 25% of residents are aged 25 to 44. That leaves a quarter of the village in the years of mortgages, nurseries and career moves, and plenty either side of it who are past those years or haven't reached them.
The Office for National Statistics models typical household income across the wider local area at about £59,000 a year before tax, for the financial year to March 2023. It is modelled, it is three years old, and it is gross, so the payslip version is smaller. Even so, that income pays an ordinary Oxfordshire mortgage, with some left over for the garden centre.
About 26% of households are one person living alone, and about 13% of all households are pensioners living alone, a group already counted inside that 26%. Couples with dependent children make up about 22% of households and lone parents about 9%. Yarnton has almost as many pensioners on their own as couples raising children, so both the school gate and the over-sixties lunch club have enough people to keep going. On the post-war closes, the house next door is about as likely to belong to a widower as to a family with a trampoline.
About 38% of residents aged 16 and over hold a degree-level qualification, about 13% have no formal qualifications, and only about 2% are full-time students. That is a broad mix of people who left school at sixteen and people who stayed on for a doctorate, living on the same roads. The university is next door, and almost none of its students live here.
Yarnton's residents are one of its real strengths: owners who stay, money that is steady without being flashy, and a mix of ages that keeps the village from tilting too far either way. They are the kind of neighbours a buyer hopes to end up beside.