Burgaw is a real town with a real downtown, which is unusual here. It is the Pender County seat, incorporated February 25, 1879, covering 4.739 square miles per the Census Bureau’s 2024 Gazetteer, and the 2020 to 2024 American Community Survey counts 3,850 people inside the limits.

The town exists because of the railroad. The post office began calling the spot Burgaw Depot in January 1854, and the depot on South Dickerson Street was built around 1850. The Town of Burgaw says the state declared it the oldest railroad depot in North Carolina in 1986. The Burgaw Historic District joined the National Register in August 1999, and the courthouse square is still the center.

Two housing markets share the 28425 ZIP code. Inside the limits the ACS counts 1,311 units, median year built 1987, median value $242,200 plus or minus $49,156. Across the whole ZIP there are 4,985 units, 1,059 of them mobile homes, median value $217,100. A Burgaw address covers both the brick blocks by the courthouse and farm country ten miles out.

On October 10, 2026 the Coldwell Banker Burgaw city page carried 141 listings, all with a Burgaw 28425 address. After removing duplicates across five result pages, 96 were active and 45 pending.

The 96 active break into 59 houses, townhomes and manufactured homes and 37 pieces of land, with houses from $50,000 to $1,490,000, median asking $374,900. Both ends are outliers: the bottom is a 1,116 square foot project house on West Williams Street, the top a house on acreage on Whitestocking Road.

The working market sits between $275,000 and $475,000. Thirty-four of the 59 fall in that band, 22 are flagged new construction, and median days on market is 91. Land is slower: 37 listings from $25,000 to $3,500,000, median $79,000.

Our Pender County market update for the three months ending August 2026 puts the county median sale price at $477,000, up 0.5 percent year over year, with days on market at 76 against 62 a year earlier. Burgaw sits under that, because the county median is carried by the coast. Read our Hampstead guide and Surf City guide and the gap is the argument for Burgaw.

Downtown has filled back in over the last two years. WWAY reported on January 19, 2026 that an “Own Your Own” competition run by entrepreneur Richard Johnson seeded several businesses now on the square. What fills a week here:

• Patty’s Place, 106 West Courthouse Avenue, the diner from that competition. Khristen Hunter opened it January 5, 2026, 6am to 3pm daily, closed Tuesdays.
• Burgaw Brewing, 103 South Wright Street, the town’s brewpub, and the restored Historic Burgaw Train Depot, now an event center.
• Junior’s Deli, Brown Dog Coffee Company and Fat Daddy’s, the deli, coffee shop and pizza parlor from the same effort.
• Osgood Canal Greenway and Urban Trail, a 2.6 mile town loop along the canal, connecting downtown to the schools.
• The NC Blueberry Festival, downtown each June. The 2026 festival ran June 19 and 20; the next is June 19, 2027.

Autumn Fest adds a Graveyard 5K along the greenway, and a chili cook-off comes downtown November 14, 2026. There is no theater, no mall and no Target. Burgaw trades those for a courthouse lawn and a downtown where people know each other.

Burgaw is served by Pender County Schools. We ran fourteen Burgaw addresses through the district’s School and Bus Stop Locator on October 10, 2026, and there is no single answer:

• C.F. Pope Elementary and Burgaw Middle came back for every address in and near the town limits. There is no Burgaw Elementary, which trips people up.
• Pender High, five to six miles out on NC 53 West, serves the town addresses we checked on Fremont, Wallace, Bridgers, McNeil and Bodenheimer.
• Heide Trask High serves addresses west and south of town, including Waverly, Sweetbrier, Stag Park and Whitestocking.
• Malpass Corner Elementary and West Pender Middle pick up the far western roads such as Horse Branch and Loop.

Now the part we will not soften. On the Department of Public Instruction’s 2025-26 designations, C.F. Pope Elementary and Burgaw Middle both carry a School Performance Grade of D with growth Not Met, and both are continually low-performing. Five of the district’s 18 graded schools were designated. Pender High is off the 2025-26 list but was designated in 2023-24 and 2024-25.

The state’s 2025-26 disaggregated file puts grade-level proficiency at 41.9 percent for C.F. Pope, 38.4 percent for Burgaw Middle, 31.2 percent for Pender High and 42.7 percent for Heide Trask. Pender Early College, an application school in Burgaw, is the outlier above 95 percent.

Change is coming. The district opened redistricting in August 2026, citing enrollment projected to rise from 10,892 students to 17,407 by 2035-36. Its page, updated October 1, 2026, says no boundaries have changed and recommendations go to the Board in January 2027. Run the address yourself.

Burgaw sits where US 117, NC 53 and the US 117 Bypass meet, with Interstate 40 about 3.5 miles east. These distances are approximate, routed from the courthouse square on October 10, 2026:

• Downtown Wilmington, 28.2 miles, about 39 minutes
• Wilmington International Airport, 21.7 miles, about 37 minutes
• Wrightsville Beach, 27.8 miles, about 39 minutes, the closest ocean by road
• Mayfaire 25.0 miles, Novant Health New Hanover Regional Medical Center 27.5 miles
• Hampstead 29.2 miles, Surf City on Topsail Island about 40 miles and an hour

The I-40 access is why Burgaw commutes better than its distance suggests, though a Wilmington job still means better than an hour on the road each day. One project matters downtown: the Courthouse Avenue Streetscape would rebuild the street and bury the utilities at a projected $2,760,180, and the town lists it as seeking grant funding.

Most of Burgaw is out of the flood zone, and the part that is not runs through the middle. We queried the FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer on October 10, 2026 against a 178-point grid inside the town limits. Zone X, minimal hazard, covered 78.1 percent of points, and 10.1 percent more fell in the shaded 0.2 percent annual chance area. The remaining 11.8 percent sat in the Special Flood Hazard Area as Zone AE or AO, including a floodway, following Burgaw Creek and the canal through town. The town’s Planning Department issues flood determinations and elevation certificates, and we ask for both. Burgaw adopted a Resilience Strategy on July 9, 2024 under the state’s Resilient Coastal Communities Program and charges a stormwater fee to fund drainage work.

You are buying in a coastal insurance county without the coastal view. Pender is one of the 18 counties eligible for the Coastal Property Insurance Pool, whose Beach Area is North Carolina south and east of the inland waterway. Burgaw is nearly 30 miles from that line. The January 2025 rate settlement raised homeowners rates an average 7.5 percent on June 1, 2025 and another 7.5 percent on June 1, 2026, with beach areas of Pender and its neighbors taking 16 and 15.9 percent instead. Burgaw avoids the beach number but still carries a coastal rating.

The tax rate is the highest in Pender County, and it just went up. From the county’s 2026 Tax Rate schedule, a house inside the limits pays Pender County 0.7375, countywide EMS 0.0925 and the Town of Burgaw 0.6400 per $100, which is 1.47 percent. The town rate rose four cents from 0.6000. Burgaw had proposed 0.4100 on the 2026 reappraisal, but Session Law 2026-8 deferred it, so the FY 2026-27 budget was built on the prior 2019 values and adopted at 0.6400 on June 29, 2026. Reappraised values first apply in FY 2027-28, and a new Municipal Service District rate of 0.1000 applies inside the downtown district.

Inside town you get water and sewer. Outside, assume well and septic. The town runs its own system at $11.56 for the first 2,000 gallons of water and $25.36 for sewer, double that outside the limits. On a rural 28425 parcel, budget for a well, septic, a fire district tax and the $200 county solid waste fee.

Growth is the live question. The school district counts 63 pending developments and more than 12,700 dwelling units in the county pipeline. Good for values, hard on schools and roads.