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Lincoln County Schools

North Carolina · runs pre-K through grade 12

There is no ZIP Code area where Lincoln County Schools is the only school district serving the homes. It holds a real share in 11 of them and shares every one, with 3 different districts in total. A lookup that returns a single district name for any of those ZIP Codes is guessing which side of a line an address falls on.

It never has a ZIP Code to itself

The counts below come from the census blocks assigned to Lincoln 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 boundary37,170
  • Residents86,810
  • ZIP Code areas it reaches11
  • Where it is the only district0
  • Where it shares with another district11
  • Where it holds under half a percent0
  • Land area296 square miles
  • Homes per square mile126

The ZIP Code areas it reaches

The spread is the thing to notice. In 28080 this district holds 98% of the homes; in 28673 it holds 1.2% of the homes. 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 28080 · Iron Station, North Carolina98% of the homes
  • ZIP Code 28092 · Lincolnton, North Carolina94% of the homes
  • ZIP Code 28037 · Denver, North Carolina90% of the homes
  • ZIP Code 28033 · Crouse, North Carolina66% of the homes
  • ZIP Code 28168 · Belwood, North Carolina64% of the homes
  • ZIP Code 28006 · Alexis, North Carolina41% of the homes
  • ZIP Code 28164 · Lowesville, North Carolina34% of the homes
  • ZIP Code 28650 · Maiden, North Carolina22% of the homes
  • ZIP Code 28021 · Cherryville, North Carolina13% of the homes
  • ZIP Code 28090 · Belwood, North Carolina3.2% of the homes
  • ZIP Code 28673 · Lake Norman of Catawba, North Carolina1.2% of the homes

What one name misses in the areas it leads

Lincoln County Schools is the largest district in 5 ZIP Code areas, and not one of them is wholly its own. Answer with its name alone and the answer misses 4,097 of the 36,818 homes those areas hold. That count is computed here from census blocks; the lookups that answer this question with a single name never print it.

Lincoln County Schools holds 2,790 of the 4,345 homes in ZIP Code 28168 · Belwood, North Carolina, so its name is right for most of the area and wrong for the rest: 1,538 homes with Catawba County Schools and 17 homes in districts too small to name here.

ZIP Code 28037 · Denver, North Carolina is a two-district area: 10,160 of its 11,243 homes are inside Lincoln County Schools, and the other 1,083 homes are with Catawba County Schools. Which one an address belongs to is settled by the street, not by the five digits.

In ZIP Code 28092 · Lincolnton, North Carolina the split runs 15,862 to 990 and the larger part is Lincoln County Schools': the rest is 990 homes with Gaston County Schools and Catawba County Schools.

In ZIP Code 28033 · Crouse, North Carolina the split runs 777 to 406 and the larger part is Lincoln County Schools': the rest is 406 homes with Gaston County Schools.

Lincoln County Schools reaches into ZIP Code 28164 · Lowesville, North Carolina with 2,142 of its 6,278 homes, behind Gaston County Schools. The familiar answer for that area is the other name, and it is wrong for those 2,142 homes.

ZIP Code 28650 · Maiden, North Carolina is another area where Lincoln County Schools is present without being the answer: 1,209 of its 5,506 homes, behind Catawba County Schools.

Lincoln County Schools reaches into ZIP Code 28021 · Cherryville, North Carolina with 770 of its 6,050 homes; 3 districts there hold a real share of it, and Gaston County Schools leads them. The familiar answer for that area is one of the others, and it is wrong for those 770 homes.

ZIP Code 28006 · Alexis, North Carolina is close to being two districts in equal parts: Lincoln County Schools holds 169 of its 411 homes and Gaston County Schools leads the rest. A lookup that picks the larger name is making a coin-toss look like a fact.

Who takes the other homes in its ZIP Codes

Lincoln 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 — Catawba County Schools, Gaston County Schools and Cleveland County Schools. They are neighbors on the same postal ground, not the next stop for its own students.

Who it shares ZIP Codes with

These districts appear alongside Lincoln County Schools in the same ZIP Code areas: Gaston County Schools, Catawba County Schools and Cleveland 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.

Where this district sits

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 11 of the 11 ZIP Code areas Lincoln 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.