Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools

A few homes at the edge of someone else's ZIP Code

The counts below come from the census blocks assigned to Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools, grouped by the ZIP Code area each block falls in. The Census Bureau publishes the blocks; the grouping is computed here, and it is the only place these particular numbers exist.

• Homes inside the boundary36,891
• Residents91,509
• ZIP Code areas it reaches8
• Where it is the only district2
• Where it shares with another district4
• Where it holds under half a percent2
• Land area62 square miles
• Homes per square mile596

The ZIP Code areas it reaches

The spread is the thing to notice. In 27510 this district holds 100% of the homes; in 27705 it holds 1 home, under half a percent. Same district, opposite answers, and a lookup that names it without the share tells the second household the same thing as the first.

• ZIP Code 27510 · Carrboro, North Carolina100% of the homes
• ZIP Code 27599 · Chapel Hill, North Carolina7 of 7 homes
• ZIP Code 27514 · Chapel Hill, North Carolina95% of the homes
• ZIP Code 27516 · Chapel Hill, North Carolina69% of the homes
• ZIP Code 27517 · Chapel Hill, North Carolina36% of the homes
• ZIP Code 27707 · Durham, North Carolina0.5% of the homes
• ZIP Code 27278 · Hillsborough, North Carolina25 homes, under half a percent
• ZIP Code 27705 · Durham, North Carolina1 home, under half a percent

The areas it leads without holding most of the homes

Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools is the largest district in 5 ZIP Code areas. Answer with its name alone and the answer misses 14,650 of the 51,391 homes those areas hold — though in 2 of them it holds every home there is. The count is homes, not addresses, and it is the number no lookup prints.

Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools is the largest name in ZIP Code 27517 · Chapel Hill, North Carolina and still holds a minority of it: 4,746 of 13,204 homes. The other 8,458 homes are with Chatham County Schools and Durham. This is the shape that makes a one-name answer worst — the name is right for fewer homes than it is wrong for.

Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools holds 12,706 of the 18,344 homes in ZIP Code 27516 · Chapel Hill, North Carolina, so its name is right for most of the area and wrong for the rest: 5,638 homes with Chatham County Schools and Orange County Schools.

ZIP Code 27514 · Chapel Hill, North Carolina is a two-district area: 11,519 of its 12,073 homes are inside Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools, and the other 554 homes are with Orange County Schools. Which one an address belongs to is settled by the street, not by the five digits.

In ZIP Code 27510 · Carrboro, North Carolina the single-name answer is the true one: Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools holds all 7,763 homes counted there, and no other district holds a share worth naming.

ZIP Code 27599 · Chapel Hill, North Carolina is another area where one name covers everything — 7 homes, all of them inside Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools.

Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools is not the name anyone would give for ZIP Code 27707 · Durham, North Carolina — Durham leads it — and Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools holds 124 homes there all the same. Answer that area with one name and that is what it is wrong about.

Who takes the other homes in its ZIP Codes

Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools runs kindergarten through grade 12 itself, so an address it holds sees no change of authority between grade school and high school. The districts listed below are the ones that take the other homes in the ZIP Code areas it shares — Durham, Orange County Schools and Chatham County Schools. They are neighbors on the same postal ground, not the next stop for its own students.

• Durham Public Schools49,220 homes in 4 shared ZIP Code areas
• Orange County Schools16,268 homes in 4 shared ZIP Code areas
• Chatham County Schools7,877 homes in 2 shared ZIP Code areas

Who it shares ZIP Codes with

These districts appear alongside Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools in the same ZIP Code areas: Chatham County Schools, Durham and Orange County Schools. A single-name lookup for one of those areas has to choose between them, and the choice is right for some addresses and wrong for others.

• Chatham County Schools2 shared ZIP areas
• Durham Public Schools2 shared ZIP areas
• Orange County Schools2 shared ZIP areas

Where this district sits

• School districts in North Carolina323 of 848 ZIP areas split
• Every district with a page here260 districts listed

What to do next

Ask the district office to confirm your street address. A district settles that question on its own site: look for a school locator, a find my school tool, or an attendance zone map. Where there is none, ask the office itself.

A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes, not a boundary: in 4 of the 8 ZIP Code areas Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools reaches, at least one other district holds a real share of the homes as well, and the line between them runs along streets. Only the district can say which side of that line an address is on.

This site links to no district website. None of the federal files it is built from publishes one, and a guessed address is worse than none. It is the district office, not a search engine, that settles an address.

If a house purchase depends on the answer, ask the district itself for written confirmation of that exact address. A listing is not a district record, and neither is this page.

What this cannot tell you

The homes were counted in the 2020 Census and the district lines are the 2026 boundary file. Nothing on this page adjusts one to the other. Where houses have been built or cleared since the count, a share here describes the place as it was counted rather than as it stands today, and in the fastest-growing ZIP Code areas that gap is the largest single source of error on this site.

A share on this page is a share of the homes in the ZIP Code area, not a probability for any particular address. Enrollment is decided by street address, and a district may run magnet, charter or choice programs that ignore the boundary entirely. If a decision depends on the answer, the district office is the only authority; this page shows what the federal boundary files say and when they were published.

A district boundary is not a school attendance zone. This site never says which school an address is assigned to: no current national dataset of attendance zones exists, and the district draws them itself. Nor is anything here endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau; we use their published files, and that is the whole of the relationship.

A ZIP Code is a set of mail delivery routes, not an area. What is mapped here is the Census Bureau's ZIP Code Tabulation Area, the closest published approximation to it. The two are not identical, and a handful of ZIP Codes used only for post office boxes or single buildings have no tabulation area at all.

Where these numbers come from

School district boundaries come from the Census Bureau's Census Geographic Relationship File, current 2026 vintage, which assigns every census block to a unified district or to an elementary and a secondary district. Homes and residents in each block come from the 2020 Census Redistricting Data (PL 94-171), H1_001 and P1_001. The ZIP Code areas come from the same Geographic Relationship File, block to ZIP Code Tabulation Area. District names and grade ranges come from the Census Gazetteer 2025, with 2020 for districts no longer listed.

The place name printed beside a ZIP Code comes from the Census 2020 ZIP Code Tabulation Area relationship files: place, county subdivision and county, taken 2026-09-06. It is a label rather than a measurement: the Census Bureau does not publish which post office a ZIP Code belongs to, so the place named is the one covering the most land inside the area, not the city the Postal Service prints on an envelope.

Everything else on this page — the shares, the counts of districts per ZIP, the comparison between the two grade bands, the rankings — is computed here from those files. The source publishes none of it. Snapshot taken 2026-09-03.