Here’s a bit of local trivia that explains a surprising amount of everyday nuisance: Holly Ridge, Surf City, and Topsail Beach all share one ZIP code — 28445 — and that single ZIP spans two counties, Onslow and Pender, plus the waterway between the mainland and the island.
How that happens
ZIP codes were never meant to be town boundaries. The Postal Service drew them in the 1960s around delivery routes — whatever one post office could reasonably cover — and out here, one office covered the Holly Ridge mainland and most of the island reachable from the bridge. Towns grew, county lines stayed put, and the routes stayed routes. The result: three distinct towns, two county governments, one five-digit code.
For contrast, Hampstead gets 28443 to itself, and North Topsail Beach — served from the Sneads Ferry side — carries 28460. The middle of the corridor is where the overlap lives.
The everyday chaos
Most of the time it’s harmless. But if you live here, you’ve probably met at least one of these:
- Online forms that insist you live in Holly Ridge when you’re on the island (or the reverse) — plenty of address databases just map 28445 to whichever town name they picked first.
- Sales tax charged for the wrong county.Onslow and Pender don’t share a rate, and tax software that works from the ZIP alone flips a coin. Locals have been grumbling about this one for years, and they’re right to.
- Deliveries and service calls that route to the wrong side of the bridge, because a dispatcher trusted the ZIP instead of the street.
- Insurance and utility quirks, since coastal rates and districts follow county and flood-map lines that cut straight through the middle of the ZIP.
Why we bring it up
Partly because it’s a good story. Mostly because it’s a useful test of whether a service company actually knows the area. Plenty of outfits “serve 28445” on paper and then get confused about where you actually are — or quietly decide the island half of the ZIP isn’t worth the bridge.
We schedule by street, not ZIP, so the 28445 quirk changes nothing about your service day. Surf City’s island streets, Holly Ridge’s new subdivisions, and the quiet south end at Topsail Beach are all just stops on the same weekly routes.
Curious whether your street is on one? Check the areas we serve— and if you’re in the messy middle of the ZIP, we promise we know which county your yard is in.