The Cornwall Boomerang Index
Every Cornish parish, ranked by how hard it is for a grown-up child to leave home. Two public numbers per parish: the share of households where the children are adults and still living with their parents, and the price of a home set against the wage the county actually pays.
Click any parish for its own figures, a sentence you can quote, and a link for anyone who wants an affordable home there.
- Stuck at home more adult children at home than the county, and prices above the county ratio
- Hollowed out prices above the county ratio, but fewer adult children at home: they have already left
- Holding on more adult children at home, prices below the county ratio
- Least pressure below the county on both
| # | Parish | Index | Adult children at home | Median price | × wage |
|---|
Parishes under 200 households, or with no usable sales, are shown but not ranked: a handful of households or sales moves the percentages too much to place them fairly.
How the index is built
Adult children at home
Census 2021 table TS003, household composition, for all 1,847 output areas in Cornwall, added up to parishes using the ONS output-area-to-parish lookup (December 2025). Counted: married, cohabiting and lone-parent families where all the children are non-dependent, which is the census term for a grown-up child living with their parents.
Price
HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, every standard sale in Cornwall from January 2023 to , matched to parishes by postcode. The median of all house and flat sales. Where a parish had fewer than 20 sales the figure is the median for its wider census area (MSOA) and is marked ≈.
Wage
ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025, provisional: median full-time gross annual pay for jobs in Cornwall, £33,900. One county figure, because earnings are not published by parish. The same figure is used throughout Nobody's Children Can Afford To Stay.
The score
Each ranked parish is placed on a 0 to 100 percentile for its adult-children share and again for its price-to-wage ratio. The Boomerang Index is the average of the two. Labels compare each parish with the county as a whole. Years to a deposit assumes saving 10% of the median wage towards a 10% deposit, with no help and no rent rises.