USDA Rural Development · Section 502 · North Carolina

502 Buying Power

Two federal loan programs share a number and almost nothing else. At your income one of them buys roughly twice the house for less money each month — and the towns just outside Raleigh qualify for both.

Rules current 2026-09-01 · FY2026 limits (PN 657) · note rate eff. 2026-08-01

Your numbers

Everything below recalculates from these. Adjusted income is your gross minus USDA's own deductions — $480 per dependent, childcare, certain medical costs — and it is the number the Direct program's subsidy is built on.

Sets the Direct subsidy
Gross, sets the ratios
Cars, cards, student loans

The finding

What each county lets you buy

Direct caps the house at a county area loan limit and caps you at a county income limit. Guaranteed has no house cap at all — it caps you on the payment ratio instead, which at this income is the tighter leash.

CountyDirect income capArea loan limitMax price — DirectMax price — Guaranteed

The ring

Every town within reach of Rolesville, checked one by one against USDA's own ineligible-area map and routed for actual drive time. Housing stock counts parcels with a building on them assessed under the $324,700 area loan limit, inside about four miles of each town centre — a measure of how much of the town is even in range, not of what is for sale today.

TownUSDADriveMilesHomes under capAvg assessed

Turning this into houses

  1. Call the Henderson RD office before you look at anything. 252-438-3134 ext. 4 covers Franklin, Granville, Vance and Person; Smithfield, 919-300-4866, covers Wake and Johnston. Direct is funded from an annual appropriation and worked through a queue — ask what the current wait is and get a Certificate of Eligibility started. That certificate, not a lender pre-approval, is what makes an offer real here.
  2. Get the free RentCast key at app.rentcast.io/app/api and paste it into the engine. That is the one thing standing between the pipeline and live listings — 50 requests a month is free and a daily sweep of this ring costs about thirty.
  3. Deploy the worker. ./deploy.sh with the Cloudflare token exported. It runs at 7am Eastern, gates every new listing on USDA eligibility, prices both programs, and emails you only what clears every rule.
  4. Verify the exact address before any offer. The engine checks the parcel point against a simplified boundary and flags anything within 150 metres of an edge. For those, type the street address into eligibility.sc.egov.usda.gov — the official answer is the only one that binds.