First in the State

Chatham County leads all 100 North Carolina counties in per capita income. It also sends 81% of its workers outside the county for work. Both of those are in the 2026 State of Chatham data, along with 246 slides of everything else.

On September 3, the Chatham Chamber held its State of Chatham breakfast, presented by Fidelity Bank. Rebecca Dickenson, the Chatham Chamber's President and CEO, tag-teamed and invited most of the data to be presented by her former colleague, Aaron Nelson, who leads The Chamber For a Greater Chapel Hill-Carrboro. The man is delighted by a spreadsheet. Two hundred and forty-six slides should have been a slog. It was not.

Around the data, the county spoke for itself. Board chair Lewis Hendricks of BOLD Commercial Real Estate and vice chair Katie Walker of Fidelity Bank opened. Chris Ehrenfeld, CEO of BOLD Companies, spoke as a Chatham Champion. Dr. Kelly Batten, superintendent of Chatham County Schools, talked about investing in our children, graduation rates, and career connections. Chris O'Brien of Radio PBO ran the trivia, which is a genuinely good idea at a breakfast built on census data.

The whole presentation is public at chathamchambernc.org/2026data, and it is worth an hour of your life. It is also long enough that a reasonable person might not get through it, so here is what it actually says.

Start with the headline, because Chatham buried it. Per capita income here is $59,363. That is not just good for a rural county, or just good for the Triangle. It is first. Out of one hundred. Wake is third at $55,448. Orange is fifth at $52,900. Durham is sixth. The county with the street festival and the tiger rescue is out-earning the county with the research park.

Chatham has 85,111 residents as of 2025, up 8,853 since 2020. Here is the part that did not surprise me: all of that net growth, and then some, came from migration. Between 2020 and 2025, the county recorded 3,678 births and 4,449 deaths. Without people moving in, Chatham would have shrunk.

Mostly from Wake. That surprised me. About 654 Wake households a year make the trip, carrying an average adjusted gross income of $148,612. The out-of-state arrivals bring even more, averaging $230,987 from the Northeast and $244,333 from the Midwest. Net it all out, and the county gains 527 households and $178 million in annual income every year.

They are landing on a lot of open ground. Of Chatham's 682.1 square miles, 669.9 are unincorporated. That is 98.2%. Pittsboro is 4.1 square miles. Siler City is six. Goldston is eight tenths of one. Cary, which is not in any meaningful sense a Chatham town, owns 1.3 square miles of the county and 2,073 housing units inside them, which is more housing than Pittsboro has.

Carolina Demography ran three projection models out to 2060. The low one puts Chatham at 127,405. The high one puts it at 183,152. Pick your favorite and plan accordingly.

Chatham has 31,863 working residents and 19,034 jobs. You can see where this goes.

Every weekday, 25,888 people drive out of the county to work. Another 13,059 drive in. Only 5,975 do both here. That is 81% of residents commuting outside the county for work, and 69% of the county's jobs filled by people who live somewhere else. Chatham and its own workforce pass each other on 64 and 15-501 twice a day and wave.

Where do they go? Wake takes 7,898 of them. Durham takes 4,580. Orange takes 4,311. And the towns run the same pattern in miniature: Pittsboro has 2,885 driving in and 2,146 driving out, with 216 people doing both. Siler City has 3,179 in, 2,063 out, 429 both.

Then there is Goldston, where 126 people drive in, 145 drive out, and exactly one person lives and works in town. One. Whoever you are, you have the best commute in North Carolina and we would like to interview you.

In 2010, 18% of Chatham was 65 or older. In 2025, it is 28%. That is 12,172 additional seniors in fifteen years, and it is the fastest aging of any county in the comparison group. Wake is at 14%. The state is at 19%.

This is not an abstraction; it is an industry. Look at the county's twenty largest employers and the third is Carolina Meadows, the fifth is Galloway Ridge, the thirteenth is The Laurels of Chatham, the seventeenth is Aegis Home Care. Health care and social assistance is now the single biggest employment sector in the county at 3,098 jobs, up 225 in one year. People retire here on purpose. Life expectancy is 79.9 years, four years above the state.

Median home closing price in Chatham was $659,000 in 2025. That is higher than Orange at $499,000, higher than Wake at $475,000, higher than Durham at $425,000. Pittsboro came in at $552,570, up $234,570 since 2020. Siler City is the outlier at $256,750, and it is the only number in this section that lets anybody breathe.

Homes closing under $300,000 fell from 345 in 2019 to 70 in 2025. Homes closing at $600,000 or more went from 223 to 672. Of last year's 1,129 transactions, 39% closed at $750,000 or above.

Two things cut against the gloom, and they are real. First, Chatham is actually building: 23% of 2025 home sales were new construction, against 11% in Orange and 7% in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro district. Second, apartment rent went down. Yes, you read that correctly. Average multifamily asking rent in Chatham is $1,516, which is 5.3% below its 2022 peak. Over five years, Chatham rents rose $164 while inflation rose $297. Chapel Hill-Carrboro and Durham both outran inflation. Chatham did not, and the reason appears to be supply: multifamily units went from 692 in 2023 to 1,599 in 2026.

Chatham County Schools has lost 323 students since 2020, a 3.6% decline, and almost all of it is in the lower grades. High school enrollment is actually up 117.

Now the part that deserves a banner. Chatham ranks sixth among all North Carolina districts in the share of high schoolers taking AP exams, at 27.5%. At Northwood, 83.1% of students score a 3 or higher, which puts it 69th out of 375 high schools in the state. Seaforth is right behind at 82.8%. Thirty-one percent of Chatham high schoolers are enrolled in Career and College Promise, the state's dual enrollment program, against 18% statewide.

The county also raised local per-pupil funding from $3,456 to $5,829 in five years. The soft spot: chronic absenteeism doubled, from 11% in 2019 to 21% in 2025. Kids are performing. They are just not always there.

Chatham's overall poverty rate is 9%, tied with Wake for the lowest in the region, and the number of children in poverty has fallen from 2,968 in 2013 to 1,658 in 2024. That is a real, sustained win.

Underneath it, the county looks like two different places. Child poverty is 8% for white children, 29% for Black children, and 32% for Hispanic children. Chatham ranks 30th out of 100 counties for infant mortality overall and 86th for Black non-Hispanic infants. The 2025 point-in-time count found 44 people experiencing homelessness, 37 of them unsheltered.

The income data cuts the other way, and it cuts hard. Between 2019 and 2024, per capita income in Chatham rose 45% overall. For Black residents, it rose 81%. For Hispanic residents, 125%. Chatham now has the highest Hispanic per capita income of any county in North Carolina and the third-highest Black per capita income.

Chatham farmed more acres in 2022 than in 2007: 114,051, up from 104,171, on 1,076 farms. Black-owned farming in the county went from nine farms and 387 acres in 2002 to 36 farms and 1,617 acres in 2022.

Chatham has 55.18 megawatts of installed solar, second in the region only to Wake, and eleven utility-scale solar systems, which is three more than Wake has.

Visitors spent $93.6 million here last year, up from $48.1 million in 2020. Tourism now supports 721 jobs and generated $3.9 million in state taxes and $3.5 million in local taxes.

Unemployment in June 2026 was 3.1%, the lowest of every neighbor, including Orange, Durham, and Chapel Hill. The county added 264 new business establishments in a single year, and the largest single category is professional, scientific, and technical services. There are 464 of them now, 89 more than last year.

All 246 slides are available on the Chatham Chamber's website at chathamchambernc.org/2026data. If you want to see the raw data behind the decisions being made about Chatham's future, that is where it is.