Population Statistics
Ystalyfera
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Neath Port Talbot · Wales

Ystalyfera population

10,218people · latest estimate

Photo: Alan Richards, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By James Burfield, SEO consultant, Bath · Page updated · GeoNames · FSA register

Ystalyfera has a population of 10,218, making it the 3rd largest place in Neath Port Talbot.

The other populations of Ystalyfera

Depending on where you draw the boundary, Ystalyfera has between 7,830 and 10,218 residents. Both are correct.

What you meanPopulationSource
The place itself
The populated settlement, roughly the built-up core.
10,218 GeoNames
The built-up area
Continuous development, where buildings sit less than 200m apart. Drawn from where the buildings are, not where the council boundary is.
7,830 ONS Census 2021 (2021)

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

Year-by-year official estimates for the wider area: Neath Port Talbot population trends, 2001–2024.

Ystalyfera in context

12 km
south to Neath, the nearest larger town
22,241
people live within 10 km
#1,221
largest of 6,358 UK places
Ystalyfera in the UK

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 Ystalyfera sits in postcode district SA9.

Food and drink on the high street

Registered premisesCount
Restaurants and cafés (17.9 per 10,000 residents)14
Takeaways and sandwich shops (15.3 per 10,000 residents)12
Pubs, bars and nightclubs (15.3 per 10,000 residents)12
Supermarkets and hypermarkets (2.6 per 10,000 residents)2

Counts are registered food premises in the Ystalyfera built-up area (7,830 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

PremisesCount
Shops (all retail) (52.4 per 10,000 residents)41
Hairdressing salons (3.8 per 10,000 residents)3
Post offices (1.3 per 10,000 residents)1
Leisure and sports centres (2.6 per 10,000 residents)2
Surgeries (GP, dental and similar) (3.8 per 10,000 residents)3
Libraries (1.3 per 10,000 residents)1
Community centres (2.6 per 10,000 residents)2

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

Category (police-recorded, 12 months)RateOn the year
Violence and sexual offences42.5-5%
Anti-social behaviour9.5-9%
Shoplifting5.4
Criminal damage and arson9.1+22%
Vehicle crime1.4
Burglary1.8
Other theft4.6
Robbery0.4
All recorded offences86.8-1%

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

Property typeMedian sale price
Detached (28 sales)£267,000
Terraced (28 sales)£135,000
All types (73 sales)£160,000
Change on the year before
each type compared with itself, July 2024 to June 2025
+7.5%

Medians of actual registered sales in the Ystalyfera 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 Neath Port Talbot, the billing authority covering Ystalyfera, is £2,541 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.

Schools

Maintained schools in the built-up areaCount
Primary schools3
Secondary schools1
Middle schools1

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

Availability% of homes
Gigabit-capable (1,000 Mbit/s+)61.7%
Superfast (30 Mbit/s+)98.9%
Unable to get 10 Mbit/s download8 homes (0.2%)

Share of the 3,753 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 →

Common questions

What is the population of Ystalyfera?
The populated place itself holds 10,218 residents. The built-up area, the boundary drawn from where the buildings actually stand, holds 7,830 at the 2021 census. The wider Neath Port Talbot council area recorded 143,249 in 2024. Each figure describes a different boundary and all are correct; the meanings table on this page says which is which, because a population without its boundary is not an answer.

Go deeper

Population since 2001
Neath Port Talbot, year by year from ONS estimates
Postcode district SA9
Wards, constituencies and the deprivation profile

Towns like Ystalyfera

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

TownCountyMedian priceOffences /1,000Median ageOwner-occupied
Ystalyfera Neath Port Talbot £160,000 86.8 43.3 66.2%
Aberdare Rhondda Cynon Taf £155,000 97.0 42.3 65.9%
Cinderford Gloucestershire £205,000 44.0 63.9%
Abercarn Caerphilly County Borough £165,000 96.2 40.8 67.2%
Cudworth Barnsley £165,000 100.0 41.1 64.3%
Ammanford Carmarthenshire £190,000 107.2 44.7 66.2%

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 Neath Port Talbot

#PlacePopulation
1Neath46,126
2Briton Ferry35,179
3Brynamman5,693
4Glyn-neath5,419
5Cwmafan5,336
6Taibach4,582

All 15 places in Neath Port Talbot →