Household composition by age
Data about household relationships might not always look consistent with legal partnership status. This is because of complexity of living arrangements and the way people interpreted these questions. Take care when using these two variables together.
Read more about this quality notice.
Estimates for single year of age between ages 90 and 100+ are less reliable than other ages. Estimation and adjustment at these ages was based on the age range 90+ rather than five-year age bands.
Read more about this quality notice.
Summary
This dataset provides Census 2021 estimates that classify usual residents in households in England and Wales by household composition, and by age. The estimates are as at Census Day, 21 March 2021.
Variable and dataset information
Area type
Census 2021 statistics are published for a number of different geographies. These can be large, for example the whole of England, or small, for example an output area (OA), the lowest level of geography for which statistics are produced.
For higher levels of geography, more detailed statistics can be produced. When a lower level of geography is used, such as output areas (which have a minimum of 100 persons), the statistics produced have less detail. This is to protect the confidentiality of people and ensure that individuals or their characteristics cannot be identified.
Lower tier local authorities
Lower tier local authorities provide a range of local services. There are 309 lower tier local authorities in England made up of 181 non-metropolitan districts, 59 unitary authorities, 36 metropolitan districts and 33 London boroughs (including City of London). In Wales there are 22 local authorities made up of 22 unitary authorities.
Coverage
Census 2021 statistics are published for the whole of England and Wales. However, you can choose to filter areas by:
- country - for example, Wales
- region - for example, London
- local authority - for example, Cornwall
- health area – for example, Clinical Commissioning Group
- statistical area - for example, MSOA or LSOA
Household composition
Households according to the relationships between members.
One-family households are classified by:
* the number of dependent children
* family type (married, civil partnership or cohabiting couple family, or lone parent family)
Other households are classified by:
* the number of people
* the number of dependent children
* whether the household consists only of students or only of people aged 66 and over
Age
A person’s age on Census Day, 21 March 2021 in England and Wales. Infants aged under 1 year are classified as 0 years of age.
Variables
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Protecting personal data
Sometimes we need to make changes to data if it is possible to identify individuals. This is known as statistical disclosure control.
In Census 2021, we:
- swapped records (targeted record swapping), for example, if a household was likely to be identified in datasets because it has unusual characteristics, we swapped the record with a similar one from a nearby small area (very unusual households could be swapped with one in a nearby local authority)
- added small changes to some counts (cell key perturbation), for example, we might change a count of four to a three or a five – this might make small differences between tables depending on how the data are broken down when we applied perturbation
Read more in Section 5 of our article Design for Census 2021.
Version history
| Release date | Reason for update |
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| Version superseded | |
| Version superseded | |
| Original release |
Dataset link
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