Combining city textures and college town sensibilities, Dayton really has a nice blend of characteristics. While not a huge city, Dayton is big enough to offer a healthy dose of diversion, opportunity, and amenity to its residents and to the thousands of college students who descend on it every fall. Its size and diversity makes Dayton more than just a college town, but removing the students from the equation would undeniably change Dayton’s character and quality of life.

Dayton has a lot of people who ride the bus to and from work. In fact, for its size, Dayton has quite a high level of public transit users. Dayton’s need for inexpensive transportation options for its citizens is quite high.

The percentage of adults in Dayton who are college-educated is close to the national average for all communities of 21.84%: 18.74% of the adults in Dayton have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.

The per capita income in Dayton in 2018 was $22,566, which is low income relative to Ohio, and lower middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $90,264 for a family of four. However, Dayton contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.

Dayton is an extremely ethnically-diverse city. The people who call Dayton home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Dayton residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Dayton include German, Irish, English, Italian, and African.

The most common language spoken in Dayton is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Other Asian languages.