Catawba County Schools

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

The counts below come from the census blocks assigned to Catawba County 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 boundary47,186
• Residents109,167
• ZIP Code areas it reaches14
• Where it is the only district3
• Where it shares with another district10
• Where it holds under half a percent1
• Land area354 square miles
• Homes per square mile133

The ZIP Code areas it reaches

The spread is the thing to notice. In 28610 this district holds 100% of the homes; in 28090 it holds 15 homes, 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 28610 · Claremont, North Carolina100% of the homes
• ZIP Code 28609 · Catawba, North Carolina100% of the homes
• ZIP Code 28682 · Lake Norman of Catawba, North Carolina100% of the homes
• ZIP Code 28673 · Lake Norman of Catawba, North Carolina99% of the homes
• ZIP Code 28650 · Maiden, North Carolina78% of the homes
• ZIP Code 28658 · Newton, North Carolina64% of the homes
• ZIP Code 28613 · Conover, North Carolina56% of the homes
• ZIP Code 28602 · Hickory, North Carolina48% of the homes
• ZIP Code 28601 · Hickory, North Carolina41% of the homes
• ZIP Code 28168 · Belwood, North Carolina35% of the homes
• ZIP Code 28037 · Denver, North Carolina9.6% of the homes
• ZIP Code 28092 · Lincolnton, North Carolina0.9% of the homes
• ZIP Code 28612 · Connelly Springs, North Carolina0.9% of the homes
• ZIP Code 28090 · Belwood, North Carolina15 homes, under half a percent

The areas it leads without holding most of the homes

Catawba County Schools is the largest district in 8 ZIP Code areas. Answer with its name alone and the answer misses 16,061 of the 50,338 homes those areas hold — though in 3 of them it holds every home there is. The count is homes, not addresses, and it is the number no lookup prints.

Catawba County Schools is the largest name in ZIP Code 28602 · Hickory, North Carolina and still holds a minority of it: 6,145 of 12,737 homes. The other 6,592 homes are with Hickory City Schools and Burke County Schools. This is the shape that makes a one-name answer worst — the name is right for fewer homes than it is wrong for.

ZIP Code 28613 · Conover, North Carolina is a two-district area: 5,492 of its 9,729 homes are inside Catawba County Schools, and the other 4,237 homes are with Newton-Conover City Schools. Which one an address belongs to is settled by the street, not by the five digits.

In ZIP Code 28658 · Newton, North Carolina the split runs 7,172 to 3,981 and the larger part is Catawba County Schools': the rest is 3,981 homes with Newton-Conover City Schools.

In ZIP Code 28609 · Catawba, North Carolina the single-name answer is the true one: Catawba County Schools holds all 2,769 homes counted there, and no other district holds a share worth naming.

ZIP Code 28610 · Claremont, North Carolina is another area where one name covers everything — 4,265 homes, all of them inside Catawba County Schools.

In ZIP Code 28601 · Hickory, North Carolina this district is one name among 5. Hickory City Schools leads with the largest share and Catawba County Schools holds 10,072 of the 24,291 homes counted there; no single name describes that area at all.

Catawba County Schools reaches into ZIP Code 28168 · Belwood, North Carolina with 1,538 of its 4,345 homes, behind Lincoln County Schools. The familiar answer for that area is the other name, and it is wrong for those 1,538 homes.

Catawba County Schools is not the name anyone would give for ZIP Code 28037 · Denver, North Carolina — Lincoln County Schools leads it — and Catawba County Schools holds 1,083 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

Catawba County Schools runs pre-K 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 — Lincoln County Schools, Hickory City Schools and Burke County Schools. They are neighbors on the same postal ground, not the next stop for its own students.

• Lincoln County Schools30,180 homes in 6 shared ZIP Code areas
• Hickory City Schools15,340 homes in 2 shared ZIP Code areas
• Burke County Schools8,580 homes in 3 shared ZIP Code areas
• Newton-Conover City Schools8,218 homes in 2 shared ZIP Code areas
• Cleveland County Schools3,487 homes in 1 shared ZIP Code area
• Alexander County Schools1,391 homes in 1 shared ZIP Code area

Who it shares ZIP Codes with

Catawba County Schools shares ZIP Code areas with 7 different districts. The most frequent are Lincoln County Schools, Burke County Schools, Hickory City Schools and Newton-Conover City Schools. In a neighborhood this crowded the question is not which district serves the ZIP Code but which side of which street an address is on.

• Lincoln County Schools5 shared ZIP areas
• Burke County Schools3 shared ZIP areas
• Hickory City Schools2 shared ZIP areas
• Newton-Conover City Schools2 shared ZIP areas
• Alexander County Schools1 shared ZIP area
• Caldwell County Schools1 shared ZIP area

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 10 of the 14 ZIP Code areas Catawba County 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.