Population Statistics
Higham Ferrers
HomeUKNorth NorthamptonshireHigham Ferrers

North Northamptonshire · England

Higham Ferrers population

6,222people · latest estimate

Photo: M15ste, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By James Burfield, SEO consultant, Bath · Page updated · GeoNames · World Gazetteer 2005 · FSA register

Higham Ferrers has a population of 6,222, making it the 11th largest place in North Northamptonshire. In 2005 the World Gazetteer recorded 6,222, a rise of 0.0% since.

6,222
in 2005
+0.0%
since 2005

The other populations of Higham Ferrers

Depending on where you draw the boundary, Higham Ferrers has between 6,222 and 8,825 residents. Both are correct.

What you meanPopulationSource
The place itself
The populated settlement, roughly the built-up core.
6,222 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.
8,825 ONS Census 2021 (2021)

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

The 2005 figure is from the World Gazetteer archive and may draw its boundary differently from the current source, so treat the change as indicative. Sources: method.

Year-by-year official estimates for the wider area: North Northamptonshire population trends, 2001–2024.

Higham Ferrers in context

2 km
south to Rushden, the nearest larger town
145,759
people live within 10 km
#1,687
largest of 6,358 UK places
Higham Ferrers 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 Higham Ferrers sits in postcode district NN10.

Food and drink on the high street

Registered premisesCount
Restaurants and cafés (7.9 per 10,000 residents)7
Takeaways and sandwich shops (5.7 per 10,000 residents)5
Pubs, bars and nightclubs (6.8 per 10,000 residents)6
Hotels, B&Bs and guest houses (1.1 per 10,000 residents)1
Supermarkets and hypermarkets (1.1 per 10,000 residents)1

Counts are registered food premises in the Higham Ferrers built-up area (8,825 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) (40.8 per 10,000 residents)36
Cafés (1.1 per 10,000 residents)1
Hairdressing salons (4.5 per 10,000 residents)4
Surgeries (GP, dental and similar) (3.4 per 10,000 residents)3
Community centres (1.1 per 10,000 residents)1
Car parks (2.3 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 offences24.9+11%
Anti-social behaviour21.8+28%
Shoplifting13.6-31%
Criminal damage and arson5.4
Vehicle crime5.0
Burglary3.2
Other theft2.8
Robbery0.6
All recorded offences85.6+8%

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 (41 sales)£400,000
Semi-detached (43 sales)£269,995
Terraced (41 sales)£235,000
All types (130 sales)£270,000
Change on the year before
each type compared with itself, July 2024 to June 2025
+1.7%

Medians of actual registered sales in the Higham Ferrers 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 →

Schools

Open establishmentsSchoolsPlacesPupilsFilled
Primary schools31,05091887.4%
Secondary schools11,10093785.2%
Special schools1

The 2021 census counted 554 children aged 5 to 9 in the town: one state primary school for every 185 of them.

Open schools registered in the Higham Ferrers built-up area, from the Department for Education's Get Information about Schools register, extracted 24 August 2026. Each school counts once: an independent special school appears under special schools, and the phase rows are state schools. Places are reported capacity and pupils each school's latest census return, summed only over schools reporting both, and shown only where at least 9 in 10 of a phase's schools do; state primaries across measured towns run at 89.2% of capacity, secondaries 91.3%. The children-per-school figure pairs a 2021 census count with today's register, so growth or decline since the census is not in it. No inspection grades are shown because Ofsted stopped issuing single-word overall judgements in 2024 and the register no longer carries them; current inspection reports are on Ofsted's own site. England only: the register lists Welsh schools without phase detail.

Broadband

Availability% of homes
Gigabit-capable (1,000 Mbit/s+)99.6%
Superfast (30 Mbit/s+)99.9%
Unable to get 10 Mbit/s download1 home (0.0%)

Share of the 3,798 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 →

Go deeper

Population since 2001
North Northamptonshire, year by year from ONS estimates
Postcode district NN10
Wards, constituencies and the deprivation profile

Nearby in North Northamptonshire

#PlacePopulation
1Irthlingborough7,502
2Thrapston7,068
3Burton Latimer6,890
4Oundle5,735
5Earls Barton5,387
6Irchester4,419

All 47 places in North Northamptonshire →