Wake County Schools: Enrollment, Ratios and Spending

By the Public School Stats Editorial Team · Last updated: October 2026

Wake County Schools is a public school district based in Cary, North Carolina. This page summarizes its federal statistics for the 2023–24 school year, with finance figures for fiscal year 2024.

With 161,481 students, Wake County Schools is the #14 largest local education agency in the United States and the #1 largest in North Carolina by fall membership in the 2023–24 CCD files, accounting for 10.5% of North Carolina’s 1,544,289 public school students that year. Size matters for reading every other figure on this page: a district of this scale runs its own transportation, food service and special-education systems, and small percentage differences translate into thousands of students. The district operated 197 schools in 2023–24 across a grade span of PK to 13, according to the CCD LEA Directory file.

Wake County Schools at a glance

Every row above carries its own year label because the underlying federal surveys do not move in lockstep: directory, membership, staff and lunch files describe the 2023–24 school year, while the finance rows come from the fiscal year 2024 F-33 file. The methodology pages explain why federal school data years are staggered and how NCES collects each file.

Enrollment and staffing

The district reported 10,798 full-time-equivalent (FTE) classroom teachers in the 2023–24 CCD staff file. Dividing fall membership by FTE teachers gives a student–teacher ratio of 15.0 to 1, compared with 15.3 to 1 statewide in North Carolina in the same files. A student–teacher ratio is not a class size: it counts every licensed teacher on staff — including specialists, intervention teachers and teachers of small special-education classes — against every enrolled student, so actual classroom rosters are usually larger. Used carefully, the ratio still shows how staffing intensity compares across districts in the same year, which is why we publish it with its formula stated. Across its 197 schools, the district averages roughly 820 students per school, although individual campuses vary widely, as the school table below shows.

Free and reduced-price lunch eligibility

In schools that reported lunch counts, 37.6% of students (60,737 of 161,481 students in reporting schools) were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch in 2023–24.

Lunch eligibility is the most widely used poverty proxy in federal school data, but it is an imperfect one: many high schools under-report because older students do not return forms, and districts using the Community Eligibility Provision serve free meals to all students and may report differently. We therefore publish the share only over schools that reported counts, and we say so on the line itself rather than quietly dividing by total enrollment.

Spending: $12,279 per pupil in fiscal year 2024

The CCD School District Finance Survey (F-33) reports $1,982,763,000 in total current expenditures for Wake County Schools in fiscal year 2024, against fall membership of 161,481 in the same file — $12,279 per pupil. The statewide NPEFS figure for North Carolina is $13,782 per pupil for the same fiscal year, so this district’s current spending per pupil is about 11% below the state figure. Current expenditures cover instruction, support services and other elementary/secondary operations; they exclude capital outlay and debt service, which is why this site uses current spending — not total spending — for per-pupil comparisons. Finance data run a full cycle behind enrollment data in the federal release schedule, which is why this page labels spending FY2024 while enrollment is labeled 2023–24: they describe the same school year through two different federal surveys.

Completions in 2023–24

The CCD Completers file records 12,584 regular secondary school diplomas awarded by Wake County Schools in the 2023–24 school year. A diploma count is not a graduation rate: the federal four-year cohort graduation rate (ACGR) is calculated by EDFacts from a tracked cohort of first-time ninth-graders, a different file with a different method. We publish the count because it is drawn directly from the completers file, and we label it as a count so it is never mistaken for a cohort rate.

Largest schools in Wake County Schools

The table lists the district’s largest campuses by 2023–24 enrollment from the CCD School Membership file, with each school’s level and lunch-eligibility share where the school reported it (n/r = not reported).

Compare this district with others in the district index, see statewide totals on the North Carolina state page, or browse the national district ranking.

Data: National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data and EDFacts, retrieved October 2026, from nces.ed.gov. Enrollment, staffing and lunch figures are for the 2023–24 school year; finance figures are fiscal year 2024 (school year 2023–24) unless a page labels them otherwise.

Disclaimer: Public School Stats republishes official federal statistics for general information only. Figures are reported as published by NCES and EDFacts and may include imputed or revised values; for decisions affecting a specific school or district, confirm the figure with the district or the NCES source file. See our full Disclaimer.