Turkey, North Carolina.
Typical home $138,901 (+15.4% in a year).
to buy the typical home at today's mortgage rate — +$435 (+148%) since Jan 2020.
- 1 year
- Up $18,580 +15%
- $120,320$138,901 since Sep 2025
- 5 years
- Up $38,928 +39%
- $99,973$138,901 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.
- Turkey$729
- North Carolina$1,743
- United States$1,922
At the last five years' pace, a typical home here doubles in price every 11 years.
Typical home values in Turkey, NC rose 15.4% over the past year — faster than the nation's +1.2%.
Living in Turkey, Sampson County, North Carolina
Turkey is a town of 213 people in Sampson County. Unemployment in Sampson County was 3.6% in August 2026, and the county had 1.7% more jobs in 2025 than the year before. The most people in Sampson County work in schools and health care, then manufacturing.
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 It can be wrong or out of date.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. Turkey is a very small town in Sampson County, North Carolina, with few residents and the quiet that comes with that. Incomes in the county run on the modest side, and homes in town are priced below what is common across much of the country. Winters are cool and seldom snowy, summers are hot, and rain falls steadily through the year.
Work. People in Turkey commonly work in schools, hospitals and social care, in manufacturing, in shops and in the building trades. Across Sampson County, the largest workplaces include Smithfield Clinton, a pork processing plant, along with Sampson County Schools and Prestage Farms. Very few people work from home, and the typical commute is a long one, so most days involve a good stretch of driving.
Things to do. The Northeast Cape Fear River is the best known of the nearby places, a river a longer drive away. Cliffs of the Neuse State Park is a protected area, also a longer drive away, and Bentonville Battlefield is an archaeological site and a longer drive away as well. Each is a day's outing rather than a short trip.
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- 3%of adults have a degree
- 5%below the poverty line
- 35 mintypical commute
- 2%work from home
What people in Sampson County work in
Employed residents by industry, from the Census survey. Sampson County had 17,386 jobs in 2025, 1.7% more than the year before (Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Weather through the year
Coldest in January, with highs near 53° and lows near 32°; warmest in July, with highs near 90° and lows near 70°. About 2 inches of snow and 51 inches of rain and melted snow a year.
Average daily high and low, 1991–2020, at the Clinton Northeast weather station, 6 miles away (NOAA).
Largest workplaces in Sampson County
- Smithfield ClintonPork carcasses, half carcasses, and primal and sub-primal cuts produced in slaughtering plants1,289
- Sampson County SchoolsSchool district1,038FTE
- Prestage FarmsHog and pig farming709
- Harnett Health SystemGeneral hospital686FTE
- County of SampsonGeneral services departments, government621
- Sampson Regional Medical CenterGeneral hospital408FTE
- Clinton City SchoolsSchool district387FTE
- Sampson Community CollegeTwo-year college356
Staff on average in 2025, as each workplace reported it to OSHA with its injury records: 57 workplaces with 20 or more staff, 7,739 people in all across the county; Turkey 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
- HurricanesVery high
- Strong windVery high
- Winter weatherRelatively high
- DroughtRelatively moderate
- HailRelatively moderate
- Ice stormsRelatively moderate
FEMA’s National Risk Index (December 2025) rates the risk each natural hazard poses to the people, buildings and farms in Turkey’s census tracts, against the rest of the country; all of them together, relatively high. 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 Sampson County.
Turkey home values
Zillow measures a city over its municipal boundary. Against the state and national figures, mid-tier homes, smoothed and seasonally adjusted.
- Turkey$138,901
- 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.
Zip codes with a Turkey address
A different geography, not a breakdown. The figure above covers the municipality; these zips cover everywhere the Post Office calls Turkey — often including townships beyond the city limits. Both come straight from Zillow, and they are not expected to average out.