Five ZIP codes carry a Cary mailing address. Twelve cover part of the Town of Cary. The two lists are not the same list, and the gap between them is what confuses buyers every week.
Five ZIP codes carry a Cary mailing address: 27511, 27513, 27518 and 27519 for street delivery, and 27512, which is PO boxes only and has no territory of its own — its boxes sit inside 27511.
Twelve ZIP codes cover part of the Town of Cary. The other seven — 27502, 27523 and 27539 (Apex), 27560 (Morrisville), 27606 and 27607 (Raleigh), 27713 (Durham) — reach into Cary’s corporate limits while carrying a different postal city. USPS will not accept “Cary” as the city name on any of them.
Which produces the thing that confuses people every week: you can live inside the Town of Cary, pay Cary taxes, vote in Cary elections, and have an Apex mailing address. It is not an error and it cannot be changed by asking. Mailing address and municipal jurisdiction are two different maps that were never drawn to agree.
It runs the other way too. 27519 spans three counties — Wake, Chatham and Durham — and contains territory in Apex and Morrisville. 27513 extends into Morrisville, Raleigh and Apex. A Cary address is not proof of a Cary house.
27511 — south-central and southeast, including the older core. About 12 square miles, roughly a fifth of the Cary-ZIP population.
27513 — north and northwest. About 18 square miles, a little over a quarter of the population.
27518 — south, touching Apex. About 10 square miles, an eighth of the population.
27519 — far west and northwest, the largest at about 22 square miles and roughly two-fifths of the population.
27512 — no geography. PO boxes only.
Submarket, not ZIP code. ZIP boundaries were drawn for mail carriers: they do not follow school assignment, town limits, or the submarkets that actually decide what a house is worth. A ZIP will cut through the middle of a subdivision and put two houses on the same street into different search results. Every portal lets you filter by ZIP and none of them tell you what you just excluded.
The four parts of Cary that behave as separate markets are set out in the Cary buyer’s guide, and each has its own study.
