For families this is usually the deciding chapter, so I want it to be factual rather than reassuring. Everything about the schools below comes from NC DPI's official School Report Cards for the 2024–25 school year. Everything about services is either verifiable or explicitly flagged as something I could not verify.
Perquimans County Schools
The district is four schools, and it is small: total average daily membership for 2024–25 was 1,715 students, up from 1,647 the year before and 1,634 the year before that.
| School | Grades | Location | SPG grade | SPG score | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perquimans Central | PK–2 | Winfall | C | 66 | — |
| Hertford Grammar | 3–5 | Town of Hertford | C | 66 | Met (83.8) |
| Perquimans County Middle | 6–8 | Winfall | C | 55 | Not Met (54.6) |
| Perquimans County High | 9–12 | Town of Hertford | C | 61 | Not Met (53.3) |
All four schools earned a School Performance Grade of C for 2024–25. The district has zero low-performing schools and is not itself designated low-performing. Three of the four are Title I schools.
Here is my honest reading of that, and you are welcome to disagree with it. A district where every school lands on a C and none is designated low-performing is a district without a crisis and without a standout. The growth measures are the more interesting column: Hertford Grammar met growth with a strong score, while the middle and high schools did not. Growth measures how much students learned in a year rather than where they started, which is why I would want a parent to look at that column and then go ask the schools about it directly.
What I would actually do
Do not buy a house on a letter grade. Call the school your child would attend, ask to visit, and ask two questions: what is the class size in the grade my child is entering, and what happened to the growth number last year. You will learn more in that twenty minutes than from any report card, and in a district of 1,715 students you will generally get a real person on the phone.
One school-district feature of small counties that is easy to miss: with a single high school, there is no in-county school-assignment decision to make. Wherever in the county you buy, your child goes to Perquimans County High. That removes a variable that dominates house-hunting in larger markets — see also Chapter 4, where the same logic applies to commuting.
Healthcare: There Is No Hospital in This County
Say it plainly, because it is the single most important service fact here. Perquimans County has no hospital.
The nearest facilities are in the two towns you already know from Chapter 4. Sentara operates in Elizabeth City, including the Sentara Albemarle Regional Health Campus at 905 Thunder Road; ECU Health Chowan Hospital is in Edenton. I am deliberately not naming one of them "the nearest hospital" or describing emergency-department status, because I could not verify from the operators' own published pages exactly which Elizabeth City facility is currently the operating hospital, whether one has replaced the other, or what services each currently carries. That is a moving picture and I am not going to freeze a guess into it.
What you should do instead: if anyone in your household has a condition where minutes matter, call the facility you would actually use, confirm what it currently does, and drive it once. Roughly 15–16 miles to Elizabeth City and about 13.5 to Edenton is what the map says; what matters is what those drives feel like at 2 a.m.
Broadband
The one thing I can verify: NC's Department of Information Technology announced a Completing Access to Broadband award covering Perquimans County with provider ATMC (FOCUS Broadband), in a press release dated June 17, 2024, as part of a $67 million round covering fifteen counties.
What I cannot verify, and therefore will not publish: how many locations that project covers, what share of the county is served today, or any FCC National Broadband Map statistic. Numbers circulating elsewhere are not in the release and I could not retrieve the FCC data.
If you work from home, verify service at the address
7.2% of working residents here work from home and that share is growing. Broadband in a rural county is parcel-by-parcel, not county-wide, and a state award announced in 2024 does not tell you whether fibre has reached the road you are looking at. Before you write an offer on a house you intend to work from, call the providers with the exact address and get a yes or a no. Ask the seller what they actually have and at what speed. If the answer is thin, price a satellite service into your monthly cost rather than assuming it will be fixed soon.
What Is Here, and What Requires a Drive
What Is Here, and What Requires a Drive
What's Here
The town of Hertford has the courthouse and county offices, churches, schools, the waterfront, a compact commercial downtown, and everyday basics. Winfall is immediately adjacent. That is the working list.
What Requires a Drive
A hospital, a big-box store of any kind, a movie theatre, and most categories of specialty retail. I am deliberately not printing a directory of individual businesses, because in a county this size businesses open and close and I would rather this page stay honest than stay current-sounding. Drive Church Street and Market Street and see for yourself; it does not take long.
The established pattern is that residents make the town of Hertford work for everyday needs and drive for everything else — Elizabeth City for a proper retail strip and healthcare, Edenton for a different mix and for the things Edenton does well. Both are inside twenty-five minutes. That is genuinely closer than the equivalent drive in a lot of rural counties, and it is one of the better arguments for this county over its neighbours.
One thing I am not going to give you
A list of major employers. NC Commerce retired the AccessNC county profile PDFs that used to publish them and replaced them with a dashboard that publishes nothing citable. Rather than repeat a stale list from a third-party site, I would rather tell you the source is gone. If employment concentration matters to your decision, ask me and I will tell you what I see in the market.
How are the schools in Perquimans County?
Four schools, all four graded C on NC DPI's School Performance Grades for 2024–25, with district average daily membership of 1,715. The district has no low-performing schools and is not designated low-performing. Hertford Grammar met its growth target; the middle and high schools did not. Perquimans County High is the only high school, so there is no in-county assignment decision.
Where is the nearest hospital?
Not in this county. Sentara operates in Elizabeth City (about 16 miles) and ECU Health Chowan Hospital is in Edenton (about 13.5 miles). I am not designating one as "the nearest hospital" because I could not verify current operating and emergency-department status from the operators' own pages — call the facility you would use and confirm before you rely on it.
Can I get broadband?
Depends on the address. The verifiable fact is a state Completing Access to Broadband award for Perquimans County with ATMC (FOCUS Broadband), announced June 17, 2024. Coverage percentages are not published in that release and I will not invent one. Call providers with the exact address before you buy if you work from home.
Is there shopping in the county?
Everyday basics in the town of Hertford, and a drive for everything else — Elizabeth City and Edenton are each inside twenty-five minutes. There is no big-box store, no movie theatre and no hospital in the county. That is the trade, and people who are happy here made it deliberately.
Sources for this chapter. School performance grades, scores, growth status, grade spans, Title I status and district average daily membership: North Carolina School Report Cards (NC DPI / SAS), 2025 reporting year covering the 2024–25 school year, LEA 720. Broadband award: NC Department of Information Technology press release, June 17, 2024. Healthcare facilities: Sentara and ECU Health published locations. Work-from-home share: ACS 2020–2024 table S0801. No employer list, broadband coverage percentage or "nearest hospital" designation appears here because no current authoritative source publishes one.
Questions about a specific property in Perquimans County?
Travis works waterfront, historic and in-town transactions across Perquimans County and can map the financing, the CAMA questions and the due-diligence order to the specific property you are looking at.