In June, three people who share a last name asked the Town of Wake Forest to raise their own taxes.
Donald Lee Eddins, John Barry Eddins, and Brenda Gail Eddins Denton filed a petition to bring roughly 2.97 acres on Rogers Road into the town's corporate limits. The Board of Commissioners certified it as sufficient at their June 16 meeting, alongside the vote adopting the town's new budget. Nobody forced this. North Carolina doesn't allow involuntary annexation anymore. The Eddins family asked for it.
That's worth sitting with for a second, because most people assume taxes only move in one direction: somebody else's decision, your bill goes up. Here, a family looked at what they'd get on the other side of a line that runs through Wake Forest and decided it was worth paying more to cross it. If you're comparing homes in this market right now, that line matters more than the address on the listing suggests, because two houses that both say "Wake Forest" can sit on opposite sides of it.
The line the listing photo doesn't show
Every property in and around Wake Forest falls into one of two categories: inside the town's corporate limits, or inside its Extraterritorial Jurisdiction, known as the ETJ. Both categories can carry a Wake Forest mailing address, a Wake Forest ZIP code, and a Wake Forest school assignment. Neither the MLS listing nor the yard sign tells you which one you're looking at.
The distinction isn't cosmetic. If you're in the corporate limits, you're a resident of the municipality: you pay the town's property tax, and you vote for the mayor and the Board of Commissioners. If you're in the ETJ, you're still a county resident. You don't pay town property tax, and you don't get a ballot in Wake Forest's municipal elections. But you're not free of the town, either. Wake Forest's zoning ordinance and its Unified Development Ordinance govern what you can build, how you can subdivide, and what your property can be used for, according to the town's own zoning page. The town regulates you. You just don't get a vote in who runs the town.
What the higher tax bill actually buys
Here's the number that makes this concrete rather than theoretical.
For the fiscal year that started July 1, 2026 and runs through June 30, 2027, the current fiscal year, Wake County raised its property tax rate two cents, to 53.71 cents per $100 of assessed value, to close a budget gap driven partly by a rising number of commercial tax appeals. The Town of Wake Forest held its own rate flat at 42 cents per $100 when its Board of Commissioners adopted the FY2026-27 budget at that same June 16 meeting.
Stack those two rates and you get the real comparison:
| Wake County rate | Wake Forest town rate | Combined rate | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inside Town Limits | $0.5371 / $100 | $0.42 / $100 | $0.9571 / $100 |
| Inside the ETJ | $0.5371 / $100 | Not charged | $0.5371 / $100 |
On a home assessed at $500,000, that 42-cent gap works out to $2,100 a year, or about $175 a month, purely on the difference between a Wake Forest address that's in the town and one that isn't. If the home sits inside the downtown municipal service district, there's a further small district tax on top for in-town properties there, which actually dropped a penny this year, to 13 cents per $100. But for the vast majority of buyers comparing a subdivision in the ETJ to one inside the corporate limits, the $2,100 figure is the number to hold onto.
What that money buys, beyond municipal services, is a vote. The five seats on the Board of Commissioners are elected by and from qualified voters of the Town of Wake Forest, full stop. An ETJ resident watching a rezoning case unfold two streets away has no ballot to cast on who decides it, no matter how directly it affects their property value or their commute. State law gives ETJ residents a guaranteed voice on specific advisory bodies, like the Planning Board and Board of Adjustment, but not the Board of Commissioners itself. A recent piece from the independent local newsroom Wake Forest Matters called this arrangement a structural mismatch between who gets governed and who gets to vote, and traced it back to a 1978 Supreme Court case, Holt Civic Club v. City of Tuscaloosa, that upheld a city's right to zone its edges without extending the franchise there.
Where the line actually runs right now
This isn't an abstract governance puzzle. It's playing out in the specific corridors where Wake Forest is building the most new housing.
The Wait Avenue and Averette Road area is the town's fastest-growing quadrant, and it's drawing enough residential investment that the town is building a new $18 million fire station there, Fire Station 6, to keep pace. Much of that newest construction sits in the ETJ or in unincorporated growth areas outside the corporate limits, which means a meaningful share of the buyers moving into brand-new Wake Forest subdivisions right now are settling into the lower-tax, no-vote side of the line without necessarily realizing it.
Contrast that with the North White Street corridor, which has become one of the most active redevelopment zones in northern Wake County. Stanley Martin's Magnolia Trace condos and several mixed-use proposals are reshaping that stretch of downtown, and those projects sit inside the corporate limits, subject to the higher combined rate and represented at the ballot box. Holding Village, built on the footprint of a former dairy farm and one of the town's most talked-about newer neighborhoods, is another in-town development where residents pay the full combined rate and get the full vote that comes with it.
Same town. Same growth story. Different sides of a line that a listing agent has no obligation to point out.
Why the line isn't moving
If this split felt temporary, like something that would sort itself out as Wake Forest keeps growing, it would matter less. It isn't temporary. The North Carolina General Assembly passed House Bill 173, "Temporarily Limit ETJ Expansion in Wake County," which freezes every Wake County municipality's ETJ boundary at whatever it was on January 1, 2025, according to Wake County's own planning department. That freeze runs through December 31, 2028.
In practice, that means Wake Forest cannot pull new territory into its ETJ for at least another two years, no matter how fast the Wait Avenue corridor fills in. The only way a property crosses from ETJ into town limits during that window is the same way the Eddins family did it on Rogers Road: an individual owner petitions for annexation, and the town processes it through its own ordinance. Wake Forest also changed mayors this past November, when Ben Clapsaddle unseated incumbent Vivian Jones, but the annexation law itself is set at the state level and doesn't move with a change in the mayor's office. If you buy in the ETJ today, you can reasonably expect to still be in the ETJ, paying the lower rate and holding no municipal vote, for the foreseeable future.
What to check before you fall for a listing
A few minutes of verification before you write an offer will tell you which side of the line a property sits on:
- Ask your closing attorney or lender to confirm which taxing jurisdiction appears on the closing disclosure. The town portion either shows up as a line item or it doesn't.
- Call the Wake Forest Planning Department directly at (919) 435-9510 and ask whether the parcel is inside the corporate limits or the ETJ. This is a five-minute phone call that resolves the question definitively.
- If you're looking at a newer subdivision in the Wait Avenue/Averette Road area specifically, ask whether any annexation petition is pending for that neighborhood. Petitions move through the Board of Commissioners' consent agenda, the same way the Rogers Road one did.
- If the home sits close to downtown, ask whether it falls inside the downtown municipal service district, which carries its own small additional tax on top of the town rate.
None of this changes whether a house is the right house. It changes whether you're budgeting accurately and whether you understand what kind of resident you're becoming.
FAQ
Does living in the ETJ affect my kids' school assignment? No. School assignment runs through the county school system, not through town versus ETJ status, so being on one side of the line or the other doesn't change which schools your address feeds into.
Can I request annexation myself if I'm already in the ETJ and want in? Yes. Voluntary annexation by petition is exactly the mechanism the Eddins family used on Rogers Road, and the Town of Wake Forest's planning department handles both contiguous and non-contiguous annexation requests from individual property owners.
Will my ETJ property automatically become part of the town eventually? Not automatically, and not soon. With House Bill 173 freezing ETJ expansion in Wake County through the end of 2028, the only path from ETJ to town limits in the near term is a voluntary annexation petition, filed and approved one property at a time.
If you're comparing Wake Forest neighborhoods and want someone who can tell you which side of this line a specific listing falls on before you get attached to it, Carmelina Hall can walk you through it. Let's connect, get a free home valuation, or set up a buyer consultation.
