Gamewell, North Carolina.
Typical home $215,248 (+2.2% in a year). Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, NC metro.
to buy the typical home at today's mortgage rate — +$664 (+142%) since Jan 2020.
- 1 year
- Up $4,709 +2%
- $210,540$215,248 since Sep 2025
- 5 years
- Up $52,773 +32%
- $162,475$215,248 since Sep 2021
Monthly payment to buy the typical home
Home value × that month's 30-year mortgage rate, 20% down, principal and interest. This is the line households feel: prices and rates compound each other.
- Gamewell$1,130
- North Carolina$1,743
- United States$1,922
At the last five years' pace, a typical home here doubles in price every 12 years.
Typical home values in Gamewell, NC rose 2.2% over the past year — faster than the nation's +1.2%.
Living in Gamewell, Caldwell County, North Carolina
Gamewell is a town of 3,702 people in Caldwell County. Unemployment in Caldwell County was 3.5% in August 2026, and the county had 0.8% fewer jobs in 2025 than the year before. The most people in Caldwell County work in manufacturing, then schools and health care.
Written by AI Claude Sonnet 5.5 wrote this on 23 October 2026 from the figures here, a list of nearby places and what it knows. It can be wrong or out of date.
What it’s like
The place. Gamewell is a small town in Caldwell County, North Carolina, with a population that skews older than much of the country. Few adults here hold a four-year degree, and typical home values sit well below what many people would expect to pay in larger metro areas. Winters are cold, with only a little snow, and summers turn warm, with plenty of rain and melted snow spread through the year.
Work. Residents work mostly in manufacturing, in schools, hospitals and social care, in shops, and in restaurants and hotels, and very few work from home. Across Caldwell County, the biggest employers include Caldwell County Schools, Caldwell Memorial Hospital and Exela Pharma Sciences. Unemployment across the county has eased compared with a year earlier, though the county has seen slightly fewer jobs than the year before.
Things to do. Tuttle Educational State Forest, a protected area, lies in or beside town, so green space is close at hand. A short drive away are McGalliard Falls, a waterfall, and Joara, an archaeological site. For a longer outing, Lake James is a reservoir within a longer drive.
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- 1,439households
- 4%of adults have a degree
- 2%work from home
What people in Caldwell County work in
Employed residents by industry, from the Census survey. Caldwell County had 25,294 jobs in 2025, 0.8% fewer than the year before (Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Weather through the year
Coldest in January, with highs near 49° and lows near 27°; warmest in July, with highs near 88° and lows near 67°. About 4 inches of snow and 50 inches of rain and melted snow a year.
Average daily high and low, 1991–2020, at the Lenoir weather station, 5 miles away (NOAA).
Largest workplaces in Caldwell County
- Merchants DistributorsGeneral-line groceries merchant wholesalers1,700
- Caldwell County SchoolsSchool district1,476FTE
- Caldwell Memorial HospitalGeneral hospital812FTE
- Caldwell Community College and Technical InstituteTwo-year college627
- Exela Pharma SciencesPharmaceutical preparations manufacturing563
- Fairfield ChairUpholstered furniture, household-type, on frames of any material, manufacturing393
- WalmartWarehouse clubs and supercenters369
- Skill Creations-Community Ops. West (Morganton, MDP, Respite, MGT)Intellectual and developmental disability facilities, residential325
Staff on average in 2025, as each workplace reported it to OSHA with its injury records: 66 workplaces with 20 or more staff, 9,872 people in all across the county; Gamewell has none of its own. School districts come from the Common Core of Data (NCES, 2023–24), hospitals from their Medicare cost reports (CMS, 2023) and colleges from IPEDS (NCES, 2023–24); FTE marks full-time equivalent staff. Not listed: many offices and banks, which need not report to OSHA; military bases, whose staff OPM withholds; and, in about half the states, city and county governments.
Natural hazards
- Ice stormsRelatively high
- Strong windRelatively high
- LightningRelatively high
- Inland floodingRelatively high
- TornadoesRelatively moderate
FEMA’s National Risk Index (December 2025) rates the risk each natural hazard poses to the people, buildings and farms in Gamewell’s census tracts, against the rest of the country; all of them together, relatively moderate. It is meant for planning, not a substitute for a local risk assessment or a flood map: FEMA’s index.
From the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 census and its American Community Survey (2020–2024 five-year estimates), and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A survey, so each figure has a margin of error, and figures it is not sure of are left out. More on Caldwell County and the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, NC metro.
Gamewell home values
Zillow measures a city over its municipal boundary. Against the state and national figures, mid-tier homes, smoothed and seasonally adjusted.
- Gamewell$215,248
- North Carolina$332,159
- United States$366,157
When this market ran hot
Each cell is that month's year-on-year home-value growth. Read left to right, top row is the latest year — the 2021–22 band is the boom.
Market heat, inside the city limits
Homes for sale
Active for-sale inventory. More supply hands power to buyers.
- Gamewell15
New listings per month
Sellers arriving at the market.
Not enough data to draw this yet.
Zip codes with a Gamewell address
A different geography, not a breakdown. The figure above covers the municipality; these zips cover everywhere the Post Office calls Gamewell — often including townships beyond the city limits. Both come straight from Zillow, and they are not expected to average out.
Zillow publishes no zip-level series with this city on the address.