I went looking for the FHA loan limit in Perquimans County the way I would for any county, expecting the North Carolina floor. HUD returned $805,000.
That did not look right, so I checked every other county in the state.
What the lookup actually returns
Queried against HUD’s official FHA Mortgage Limits lookup — state NC, county Perquimans, FHA Forward, calendar year 2026:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| MSA name | NON-METRO |
| One-family | $805,000 |
| Two-family | $1,030,550 |
| Three-family | $1,245,700 |
| Four-family | $1,548,100 |
| HUD’s median sale price for the county | $175,000 |
The CY2026 standard limits are $541,287 for one family, and the national ceiling is $1,249,125.
All one hundred counties
I ran the whole state. Only nine counties exceed the floor, and Perquimans sits at the top of them:
| One-unit limit | Counties |
|---|---|
| $805,000 | Perquimans |
| $757,850 | Camden, Currituck, Gates |
| $718,750 | Dare |
| $634,800 | Chatham, Durham, Orange, Person |
| $541,287 | The other 91, including Pasquotank and Chowan |
Two things worth flagging
Pasquotank is not in on this. Perquimans used to sit inside the Elizabeth City micropolitan area — HUD’s CY2024 and CY2025 rows show it. For CY2026 HUD lists Perquimans as NON-METRO, while Pasquotank stays under Elizabeth City at the $541,287 floor. Adjoining counties, fifteen minutes apart, with an FHA gap of more than a quarter million dollars.
Conventional is completely ordinary. The FHFA conforming limit here is $832,750 — the plain national baseline. Nothing about this county carries a general high-cost designation. The anomaly is FHA-only.
And I am not going to explain it
HUD’s own median sale price for the county is $175,000. One hundred and fifteen percent of that is about $201,250 — nowhere near even the floor, let alone $805,000. The figure has been unchanged since at least CY2024 and the older rows are stamped “Last Revised 01/01/2021.” I could not find a HUD statement, mortgagee letter or rule accounting for it.
So: it is real, it is current, and I do not know why. I would treat it as a number that could be corrected in some future year rather than a permanent feature of this market, and I would verify it on HUD’s lookup before building a purchase around it.
What it means practically
Honestly? Very little, and that is the interesting part. At more than three times the county’s median owner-occupied home value, nobody here is going to bump into an $805,000 ceiling. What it means is that no FHA borrower in this county is constrained by the loan limit — which is not something you can say about ninety-one other North Carolina counties.
The financing fact that changes more lives here is the boring one: the entire county is USDA-eligible, so zero down works everywhere. That is on the financing page, along with the 1% land transfer tax that nobody budgets for.
