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Bridgend county borough · Wales

Porthcawl population

15,672people · latest estimate

Photo: Ron Speed, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Porthcawl has a population of 15,672, making it the 4th largest place in Bridgend county borough. In 2005 the World Gazetteer recorded 15,813, a fall of 0.9% since.

The other populations of Porthcawl

The same name covers more than one area, and each has its own figure.

Why these differ: which population figure is right? · compare with another place

Porthcawl in context

9 km

east to Bridgend, the nearest larger town

82,411

people live within 10 km

#830

largest of 6,358 UK places

Distances are straight-line from the settlement's recorded coordinates. The 10 km figure sums the recorded places within that radius, so it describes how built-up the surroundings are rather than people per square kilometre.

The centre of Porthcawl sits in postcode district CF36.

What the data shows about Porthcawl

The high street carries more takeaways per head than 9 in 10 comparable towns: 14.6 per 10,000 residents. Porthcawl is among the oldest tenth of English and Welsh towns: an estimated median age of 54.1 against a typical town's 42.5, with 32.6% of residents aged 65 or over. The modelled air is among the cleanest twentieth of English and Welsh towns: PM2.5 of 4.6 µg/m³ against a typical 6.8.

Against Bridgend, the nearest larger town 9 km east: house prices are 41% higher (£325,000 against £230,000); recorded crime is lower (78.9 against 98.6 per 1,000).

Each percentile compares Porthcawl with every English and Welsh town of 10,000+ residents that carries that measure, on the same built-up-area boundary. The sections below give every figure its source, its date and its caveats, and a high or low position is a starting point for questions rather than a verdict.

Age profile

From the 2021 census age table for this built-up area (15,775 residents). The shares are exact sums of the census's five-year bands. The median is exact to its band: the middle resident of Porthcawl falls in the 50 to 54 band, and the single figure is interpolated within it, which is why it is labelled estimated; single year of age is not published at this geography. A typical town's estimated median is 42.5. Compare towns →

Food and drink on the high street

Counts are registered food premises in the Porthcawl built-up area (15,795 residents at the 2021 census), from the FSA food hygiene register, extracted 17 August 2026. The boundary is drawn from where the buildings are, so these figures cover the town itself rather than the wider council area, and no total is shown because the register also lists premises nobody would call a venue: school kitchens, care homes, warehouses. Compare towns →

Shops and services

Shops, cafés, salons, banks, post offices and arcades are rateable premises by use on the VOA 2023 rating list — the shops figure is all general retail, charity shops included. Gambling premises come from the Gambling Commission's licensing register, which lists 6,251 betting shops nationally against the rating list's 3,838: many betting shops are rated as ordinary shops, so the licensing register is the truer count and the one used here. Categories the rating list counts badly are deliberately absent rather than wrong: petrol stations disappear into supermarket ratings, vets and museums run far under their professional registers, and pools and nurseries mostly rate inside other premises. Same built-up-area boundary as the download table on this page.

Crime, per 1,000 residents

The all-offences line is a count of records, not a safety score: it weighs every category equally, which is exactly why we publish the categories. We deliberately do not combine them into a single index.

The year column compares August 2025 to July 2026 with the twelve months before it, August 2024 to July 2025, two windows that do not overlap. A dash means that category had fewer than 50 offences in one of the years, where a percentage would be arithmetic rather than information. Read these as changes in what was recorded: a force changing how it logs a category, or a local campaign encouraging people to report, moves this column without anything changing on the street. The change is withheld entirely for any town whose force did not publish all twelve months in both years.

Figures are police-recorded crime (August 2025 to July 2026) located to this built-up area, per 1,000 residents at the 2021 census. Three cautions, each of which changes how a rate should be read: recorded crime is not crime experienced, because reporting rates differ by category and by place; the denominator counts residents, so town centres and visitor towns run high per resident precisely because many people there are not residents; and a high figure can reflect more reporting as easily as more crime. Percentiles compare towns of 10,000+ residents. Greater Manchester and Gloucestershire constabularies do not publish, so their towns show a note instead of a partial figure. Compare towns →

House prices

Medians of actual registered sales in the Porthcawl built-up area, July 2025 to June 2026, from HM Land Registry Price Paid data (standard open-market sales only; repossessions, part-value transfers and non-residential records excluded). A median is the middle sale, so it resists the mansion problem that skews averages. Recent sales take weeks to register, which is why the window ends before the current month. Types with fewer than 20 sales are not shown. The year-on-year change compares this window with the twelve months before it, July 2024 to June 2025, and compares each property type with itself before combining them on this year's mix. Doing it the obvious way instead, median against median, would have this town's prices swing on which kind of house happened to sell: one town in this data sold 29 detached houses one year and 9 the next, and its raw median halved without a single house changing price. The change is published only where the types compared cover most of the year's sales and the town saw 50+ of them. Compare towns →

Council tax

The area Band D council tax for Bridgend, the billing authority covering Porthcawl, is £2,478 for 2026–27.

From the Welsh Government's council tax levels (Table 1): the overall average including police and community council elements, so it is the council's figure rather than the town's, and your own band depends on your property's 2003 valuation — Wales revalued in 2003 where England still uses 1991.

Who owns the homes

Census 2021 records for the 7,277 households in this built-up area. Every share is of households, not residents. Shared ownership is counted with mortgaged homes; households living rent free sit in none of the tenure rows, so the rows can sum a little under 100%. A typical town has 66.2% owner-occupied homes and 19.4% of households without a car; car rows record whether a household has one available, which says nothing about how often it is driven.

Schools

From the Welsh Government's address list of schools (April 2026), located to this built-up area by postcode. Maintained schools only. No capacity or fill figures are shown: Wales publishes no per-school capacity file beside the address list, and the English pages' fill rates come from exactly such a file, so a Welsh version would be a guess.

Broadband

Share of the 7,581 residential premises in this built-up area that the fixed network can serve at each speed, from Ofcom's Connected Nations coverage data (network state July 2025). Availability is what the line to a home can deliver if ordered, not what households actually subscribe to, and a full-fibre street where everyone bought the cheapest package shows 100% here. Percentile compares towns of 10,000+ residents. Compare towns →

Air quality

Modelled background concentrations from DEFRA's Pollution Climate Mapping, averaged over this built-up area's 1 km grid cells weighted by where its postcodes actually are, so the fringe fields do not dilute the air people breathe. Modelled means modelled: kerbside spots run higher than any background figure. The reference points are stated for scale, and sitting between them is normal for a British town; a typical measured town's PM2.5 is 6.8.

Bathing water

The annual classification of each designated bathing water, from a season of water samples: Excellent, Good and Sufficient met the standard, and Poor means advice against bathing applied. Shown exactly as the regulator published it — the Environment Agency for waters in England, Natural Resources Wales for waters in Wales, each on its own register.

Listed buildings

Its Grade I entry is Church of St John the Baptist.

Entries on Cadw's register of listed buildings in Wales whose recorded point falls inside this built-up area, snapped through the nearest postcode, the same join the stations use. The Heritage at Risk and conservation-area figures cover England only, so their absence here says nothing about the town. A count like this mostly reflects how much of the town stood before 1840, which is why no league table ranks it.

Work and occupations

Census 2021 records for the 13,764 residents aged 16 and over in this built-up area. Census day fell mid-pandemic and furloughed workers were counted as employed, so these shares describe that day rather than today; the current official unemployment rate exists only at local-authority level, on ONS labour-market pages. Each row names its own denominator because they differ, and mixing them is how work statistics mislead. No earnings figure is shown: the official earnings survey stops at district level, and no honest town-level number exists.

Getting to work and getting around

No railway station lies inside the built-up area. The nearest National Rail station may sit just outside the boundary.

121 marked bus stops sit inside the built-up area (76.6 per 10,000 residents).

Travel shares are the 2021 census (6,320 working residents 16+): collected on 21 March 2021 under pandemic restrictions, when home-working was at its peak and commuting suppressed, so they describe that day and overstate today's home-working everywhere. They remain the only commuting record that exists at town level. Stations and bus stops are the Department for Transport's NaPTAN register as at 25 August 2026, located to this built-up area by coordinates; tram and metro are shown as presence only, because the register records their stops differently per system and an honest count does not exist. Passenger figures are the Office of Rail and Road's estimates of station usage, modelled from ticket sales and labelled estimates for that reason; a station shown without one did not match the ORR table by name, and no figure beats a guessed one.

Common questions

Go deeper

Towns like Porthcawl

The closest statistical matches among English and Welsh towns of 10,000+ residents, with geography playing no part. Porthcawl's own figures sit in the first row for comparison.

Matched on up to six measures — house prices, recorded crime, median age, owner-occupation, gigabit availability and professional occupations — each rank-normalised across the 773 towns that carry at least four of them. The likeness is mechanical, and the columns are here so you can judge it yourself.

Nearby in Bridgend county borough

All 17 places in Bridgend county borough →