We publish an annual post with statistics about North Carolina’s veteran population. The most current version of that profile was published in November 2020. The profile contains the following information:
In addition to this, we regularly answer questions about veterans in North Carolina and their well-being. Here are some of the questions we’ve answered this past year.
The age distribution of NC veterans looks different for male and female veterans. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, the largest group of NC veterans in 2020 were men aged 70-74; there were more than 90,000 veterans in this age group. Among women, the most common age of veterans was 55-59 (10,096 veterans).
Wake County had the largest number of veterans in the state (54,264) in 2020, according to the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, followed by Cumberland (52,017) and Mecklenburg (51,604). Hyde (245) and Tyrrell (309) had the smallest number of veterans.
This data is not directly reported by either the Department of Veteran’s Affairs or in the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), but there are ways to calculate it from the ACS using Table C21007: Age by Veteran Status by Poverty Status in the Past 12 Months by Disability Status for the Civilian Population 18 Years and Over (yes, that title is a doozy).
To obtain the total number of disabled veterans in the county, researchers can sum up the total in poverty and not in poverty for veterans age 18-64 and 65+. The most current data for all counties is from the 2019 5-Year ACS.
According to the 2020 March Current Population Survey, there are 295,000 veterans in North Carolina who report that they are not working because they are retired.
The most current data on veteran suicide statistics is maintained by the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.
The 2018 fact sheet is the most current: there were 205 veteran suicides in North Carolina in 2018. This represents 14.2% of the 1,442 suicides in North Carolina that year. The veteran suicide rate in North Carolina was 28.6 per 100,00 North Carolina suicides, higher than the overall suicide rate of 18.0.
Data on branch of service is not provided by either the American Community Survey or the Department of Veterans Affairs, but a recent profile of veterans in North Carolina from the VA has a wide variety of other information, such as VA expenditures and VA facilities.
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