A household consists of one or more people who live in the same dwelling and also share at meals or living accommodation, and may consist of a single family or some other grouping of people. A single dwelling will be considered to contain multiple households if either meals or living space are not shared. The household is the basic unit of analysis in many social, microeconomic and government models, and is important to the fields of economics and inheritance. Household models include the family, varieties of blended families, share housing, group homes, boarding houses, houses in multiple occupation (UK), and a single room occupancy (US). In feudal times, the royal Household and medieval households of the wealthy would also have included servants and other retainers.
For statistical purposes in the United Kingdom, a household is defined as "one person or a group of people who have the accommodation as their only or main residence and for a group, either share at least one meal a day or share the living accommodation, that is, a living room or sitting room".
The United States Census definition similarly turns on "separate living quarters", i.e. "those in which the occupants live and eat separately from any other persons in the building" A householder in the U.S. census is the "person (or one of the people) in whose name the housing unit is owned or rented (maintained);" if no person qualifies, any adult resident of a housing unit is a householder. The U.S. government formerly used the terms "head of the household" and "head of the family" to describe householders; beginning in 1980, these terms were officially dropped from the census and replaced with "householder".