Buying a Home in Casper, Wyoming: Mills, Evansville, Bar Nunn, Casper Mountain and What Is Being Built

The streets in Bar Nunn are unusually wide for a town of about 3,000 people. They were laid out on the runways and taxiways of Wardwell Field, an airport that opened in 1927 and closed in 1952. Ronnie Nunn, a local businessman, bought the closed field in 1954 and subdivided it in 1958, and the town grew up on the old pavement. The hangar is still standing with a restaurant inside it. The Casper Star-Tribune has told the story of pilots who mistook the town for an airfield and tried to land. Casper itself, Wyoming's second-largest city, is right next door, and everything around it is one county.

I'm Jeff Moran, NMLS #483943, a mortgage broker licensed in Wyoming through C2 Financial Corporation, and I have been in the mortgage business since 1996. I work out of Bluffton, South Carolina, and I wrote this page for anyone thinking about buying a home in the Casper area. If you are buying in the Casper area, you are choosing among the City of Casper, the towns of Mills, Evansville and Bar Nunn beside it, and unincorporated Natrona County, which includes Brookhurst, Vista West and Casper Mountain. The facts below come from public sources, linked beside the ones that matter most, and they were checked on October 13, 2026.

The towns and places around Casper

Casper

Casper is the county seat, with 58,771 people in the Census Bureau's July 2025 estimate. Locals call it Oil City, a nickname from the Salt Creek oil boom, and the metro's main news site, Oil City News, carries it in its own name. The North Platte River runs through the city, and Casper Mountain rises directly south of it. Downtown has David Street Station, the outdoor event plaza where the festivals and the farmers market set up. The Nicolaysen Art Museum on East Collins Drive is the Nic to anyone who lives here. Fort Caspar, the old army post on the river that is now a museum, keeps the older spelling, and the city is Casper with an e.

Next to downtown is the Old Yellowstone District, a former industrial corridor that the City of Casper runs as its named redevelopment area. The old rail bed through it is now the Casper Rail Trail. On the west side, about 350 acres that were the Amoco refinery until it closed in 1991 are now a business park, trails, parks and Three Crowns Golf Club, a par-72 course that opened in May 2005. Three Crowns' own history page says about 120 recovery wells still pump groundwater at roughly 700 gallons a minute. The wetlands that filter that water are the course's water hazards. If you see the Sandbar mentioned, that is history: the district west of downtown was razed in the mid-1970s, and City Hall stands where it was.

Mills

Mills is immediately west of Casper on the North Platte, with 4,034 people in the 2020 census. The state's Economic Analysis Division named it Wyoming's fastest-growing community above 2,000 people in 2022, as K2 Radio reported. In December 2025 the Mills council approved Ridge West, 86 single-family lots on about 27 acres, according to Oil City News. The Natrona County Library has a branch on Fifth Street in Mills, and Freden Park on Falcon Avenue has a large shelter, picnic tables and a playground.

Evansville

Evansville is immediately east of Casper, with 2,746 people in 2020. The same K2 Radio report ranked it first in Wyoming for growth rate in 2024, at about 2.1% a year. North Platte Park Development LLC plans roughly 80 homes northeast of Eagle Estates on the west end of town. The Town Council voted to seek a Wyoming Business Council grant of about $3.8 million for the water lines, sewer and roads to serve them, according to Oil City News. On the industrial side, Mesa Natural Gas Solutions is building a 220,000-square-foot facility on 202 acres the town opened up with a separate grant. Edness K. Wilkins State Park, 361 acres along the river about six miles east of Casper, is the park locals call EKW. Reshaw Park opened a Wild West themed playground with ramps and harness swings in January 2025.

Bar Nunn

Bar Nunn had 2,981 people in 2020, up 35% from 2010, and the town has started updating its code as it nears 4,000 residents. The council has discussed two ways to annex more land, out to the Department of Transportation fence along Salt Creek Highway or a larger area reaching the interstate. Nothing has been decided. Bar Nunn Elementary closes for the 2026-27 school year, which the schools section below explains, and the nuclear factory once planned just north of town went to Tennessee instead.

Casper Mountain and the mountain places

Casper Mountain is a named community on the mountain south of the city, outside any town limits, and it has its own fire district levy, which the tax section explains. Hogadon Basin Ski Area is 11 miles south of Casper on the mountain, city-owned, with 28 trails. The Casper Mountain Trails Center, run by Natrona County Parks, grooms about 42 kilometers of Nordic trail, part of it lit for night skiing, according to Natrona County. Garden Creek Falls drops at the base of the mountain inside Rotary Park, and the Bridle Trail loop runs close to five miles out of that park and climbs about 1,200 feet. Beartrap Meadow hosts the summer music festival. The Lee McCune Braille Trail, 1,900 feet of guiderail with signs in English and Braille, has been a National Recreation Trail since 1976.

Brookhurst, Vista West and the county districts

Brookhurst and Vista West are named communities just outside the city limits, in unincorporated Natrona County, and the Census Bureau counts each of them on its own. Each one has its own improvement and service district with a Fiscal Year 2026 budget, listed on Natrona County's special districts page. A home in one of those districts can carry the district's own tax levy, which a City of Casper address does not, and the tax section below shows how that changes the bill when you compare two addresses.

Alcova and the lake country

Alcova is 33 miles southwest of Casper on Wyoming Highway 220, at Alcova Reservoir. Natrona County calls the reservoir the primary recreation area for Casper and the surrounding region. It covers 2,470 surface acres with eight boat ramps and ten reservable docks, and Black Beach has a barrier-free fishing pier. Pathfinder Reservoir is about 47 miles southwest of the city and Gray Reef Reservoir about 30. Bessemer Bend, the last Oregon Trail ford on the North Platte, is a free BLM site with a short interpretive trail.

Hat Six Road, Midwest and Edgerton

Hat Six Road, also written Hat 6, is the rural acreage corridor east and southeast of the city, roughly 15 miles out. Nearly 10 miles of it are on the state's 2026 resurfacing list. Midwest, with 291 people, and Edgerton, with 153, are the Salt Creek Oil Field towns 40 miles north. They share one school and one water system, Midwest keeps the Salt Creek Museum on the oil field's history, and the county library has a branch in Edgerton.

New homes, and where they are being built around Casper

Natrona County had 80,526 people in the Census Bureau's July 2025 estimate, up from 79,955 in the 2020 census. The City's own March 2026 building report counted 13 new single-family home permits from January through March. Its annual report for 2025 put all permits at about $153.7 million in construction value, comparable to 2024.

The largest residential approval this year is Robertson Road Addition No. 2, 66 lots on roughly nine to ten acres at 3346 Chuckwagon Road. The land was rezoned to R-3, which allows one to four units per lot, for a mix of single-family homes, twin homes and townhomes, as Oil City News reported in June 2026. On the west side, near the CY Avenue Walmart, the Wyoming Housing Network is building Goodwill Landing. That is 24 permanent affordable rental homes, 22 of them dome-style and two duplex units, built with structural cellular concrete and backed by a $1 million Wells Fargo grant. The City sold Tract G of the Mesa Del Sol Addition to the same nonprofit in late 2025, one of the city-owned properties it is selling to get housing built. It then applied for a grant of about $2.65 million to build the street and utilities there.

Casper's zoning runs from R-1 residential estate through R-4 high density, and R-6 is its own district for manufactured home parks. That is useful to know if you are considering a manufactured home. The guiding document is the Generation Casper comprehensive plan. If the home you are considering is in a subdivision with an association, please ask early for the association's declaration, bylaws, rules, annual budget and most recent financial statement. Those documents are where the dues and the rules live, and the dues are part of the monthly payment a lender qualifies you on.

Casper road construction in 2026, and the airport

Interstate 25 through Casper. The Walsh Drive overpass work is finished. The project under way now rebuilds the northbound and southbound bridges over McKinley Street, between mileposts 186 and 188. It also removes the Hereford Lane bridge and adds lanes for merging on and off between the interchanges from Center Street to Bryan Stock Trail. WYDOT awarded the $42.9 million contract to WW Clyde in December 2025. Traffic runs one lane in each direction at 45 mph through the zone, and the work runs through 2028.

Poplar Street and CY Avenue. Poplar Street closes completely from the CY Avenue intersection to Collins Street from June to September each year through 2028. The work is water and sewer replacement and new roadway, under a $12.8 million contract with Oftedal Construction, according to Oil City News. The Poplar and CY intersection itself is slated for about $8.7 million of reconstruction with new sidewalks, curb and gutter and storm sewer. Wyoming Boulevard gets 4.15 miles of repaving this year, with the old top layer ground off and a new one laid down, and Hat Six Road gets nearly 10 miles of resurfacing. For live conditions, wyoroad.info's Casper page is the one to bookmark.

Trails and the airport. The Casper Rail Trail grew by three miles in 2026, to nine miles total, past EKW to near County Road 604. The ribbon cutting was April 25, 2026, a $300,000 grant from the Wyoming Office of Outdoor Recreation paid for it, and the trail is part of the Great American Rail-Trail. A new bridge connecting Casper with the west-side Paradise Valley neighborhoods opened in April 2026 too. At Casper/Natrona County International Airport, United added an eighth daily flight to Denver beginning May 21, 2026. The airport closed 2025 above 100,000 passengers, its highest in a decade. United was the only airline serving Casper as of July 2026, so every connection runs through Denver.

Casper schools: buildings, budgets and the Bar Nunn closure

The district is Natrona County School District #1, countywide, plus Midwest Schools for Midwest and Edgerton. On November 10, 2025, the Board of Trustees voted 6-3 to close Bar Nunn Elementary and 6-3 to close Woods Learning Center for the 2026-27 school year, as Oil City News reported. Bar Nunn Elementary had 156 students enrolled against a 444-student capacity. Elementary enrollment across the district had fallen six school years in a row, by 777 students. If you are buying in Bar Nunn, please confirm with the district which school a Bar Nunn address is assigned to for 2026-27, because that was not published at the time of the vote. The district's Fiscal Year 2027 budget is $352.9 million, approved unanimously in July 2026.

A search for "new Kelly Walsh High School" still returns stories that read current, and the building is done. The $86 million, 335,685-square-foot school was completed in 2018 on the old site. The district's Center for Advanced Professional Studies offers advanced classes to 11th and 12th graders, with about 500 students expected to spend part of the day there. The district also runs the Casper Planetarium on North Poplar Street. Casper College is the higher-education institution here, with enrollment up about 2% this fall. Last year 446 of its students transferred to four-year schools, 88% of them to the University of Wyoming in Laramie. There is no University of Wyoming campus in Casper.

Hospitals and emergency rooms in Casper

Banner Wyoming Medical Center is the city's main hospital. Its East Campus reopened in January 2026 as a specialty hospital focused on orthopedics after a $6 million renovation, Banner Health announced. It has four upgraded operating rooms, 37 inpatient beds, full imaging and lab, and a walk-in clinic. Summit Medical Center is a 16-bed surgical facility on the east side, owned by the Casper subsidiary of Memorial Hospital of Converse County. It added a 24-hour emergency department with space for up to 12 bays, which Oil City News covered in May 2026. So Casper now has two emergency rooms, one on each side of town.

The Casper VA Clinic is at 6000 East 2nd Street, on the first floor of the Parkridge Professional Center, under the Sheridan VA health care system. It offers primary care, labs, mental health, audiology and physical therapy, and a separate Casper Vet Center offers counseling. The City Council approved a replat of the Park Ridge Medical Campus around it in September 2026, turning about 28 acres into three lots and a tract.

Employers, and the big projects that are proposed, delayed or gone

Oil is still at the center of Casper's economy. The HF Sinclair Casper Refinery, built in 1923, processes about 30,000 barrels a day with roughly 150 permanent employees and 25 contract workers. True Companies, a multi-generation Wyoming oil and drilling family of companies, is headquartered here, and Wyoming Machinery Company is the state's Caterpillar dealer. Banner Health, the school district, the City of Casper, Walmart, Menards and Summit Medical Center are named repeatedly among the largest employers. Oil City News reported in April 2026 that the county had 40,200 jobs outside farming and ranching, 800 fewer than January 2025, while sales tax collections ran nearly 6% ahead of the year before.

Three energy projects get searched constantly, and all three have moved since the coverage you will find first.

• Radiant Nuclear is not coming to Bar Nunn. In October 2025 Radiant chose Oak Ridge, Tennessee for its first microreactor factory, after dropping a plan for about 130 acres just north of Bar Nunn. The reason, as Cowboy State Daily reported, is that Wyoming law allows spent fuel to be stored only at operating reactor sites, and Radiant's model stores it at the factory. The older stories about 250 jobs still show up in search results.
• The Prometheus Hyperscale data center is proposed, and nothing has been approved. The plan is 940 acres on the Falls Ranch property south of Interstate 25 between Casper and Glenrock, 1.25 gigawatts, about $500 million, powered by natural gas engines. It was presented at the workshop portion of the county commissioners' September 1, 2026 meeting, where no decisions are made and none were. The commissioners said it still needs a formal application, a zoning change through the county Planning and Zoning Commission and special use permits, according to Oil City News.
• DinoSolar, the solar farm west of Bar Nunn, was cut back and pushed out. NextEra Energy Resources reduced it from 440 to 240 megawatts and moved construction to on or before March 3, 2029, as Cowboy State Daily reported in March 2026.

Downtown is getting its first new hotel in about 60 years. The C.H. Bixby Hotel, a $26 million, five-story Hilton with roughly 120 rooms near David Street Station, is expected to open in 2027. The City adopted an urban renewal plan for it that uses tax increment financing, according to Oil City News. That means the new property tax the hotel generates pays for the street repairs, utility connections and cleanup around it. The College National Finals Rodeo fills the Ford Wyoming Center each June, the Central Wyoming Fair and Rodeo runs in July with its parade downtown, and the Casper Marathon along the river is a Boston qualifier.

Shopping and restaurants that opened in 2026

Almost all of this year's new national retail landed in one east-side center, Blackmore Marketplace. Five Below opened at 560 Newport Road in February 2026, and Maurices moved there from Eastridge Mall. HomeGoods and Sierra held their grand openings on April 2, 2026, with Casper's Sierra the chain's 150th store. Burlington opened on April 8, 2026 as the chain's first store in Wyoming. Barnes & Noble followed with a grand opening on August 7, 2026, more than 13,000 square feet and one of two in the state, as Oil City News reported. Cheba Hut opened May 1, 2026 at 1668 Heathrow Avenue, near Fun Valley Park and Susie McMurry Park.

Eastridge Mall has gone the other direction on purpose. It is filling storefronts with local businesses on low rent and offering $100 weekend pop-up slots in its food court, as Your Wyoming Link reported. For produce, the Wyoming Food for Thought Project runs the summer market at David Street Station and a winter makers market at its own West First Street building. The Natrona County Master Gardeners market runs Saturdays at the Agricultural Resource and Learning Center on Fairgrounds Road.

Property tax on a Casper home

Wyoming assesses a home at 9.5% of its fair market value, and that assessed value is what the tax rates apply to. The rates are stated in mills, and a mill is one dollar of tax for every $1,000 of assessed value. These levies depend on where the home is, and they come from the City's FY2026 levy vote and Natrona County's mill levy page:

• City of Casper: 8 mills. At that rate, $50,000 of assessed value carries $400 of city tax.
• Natrona County Fire Protection District: 3 mills, on homes in the unincorporated county.
• Casper Mountain Fire: 3 mills, on the mountain.
• Pioneer Water and Sewer District: 8 mills, where that district serves the address.
• Natrona County Weed and Pest and the Senior Citizen Service District, 1 mill each, countywide.

Your full tax bill adds the state, county and school levies on top of those, so this list is only part of it. The county publishes the current year's mill levy sheet, and the Assessor's office can tell you every levy on a specific address. Two homes a few miles apart can carry different levies on the same assessed value, one inside Casper and one in the Brookhurst or Vista West district.

The 25% primary-residence exemption now has to be applied for. It takes 25% of the first $1 million of fair market value off the assessment, for a home you live in as your primary residence at least eight months of the year. You file it by affidavit with the county assessor. It was automatic in 2025, and for 2026 it required an application. The window opened October 1, and Wyoming Public Media reported the Department of Revenue extended the deadline to March 1, 2026. Please ask the Natrona County Assessor for the current year's window as soon as you close.

Wyoming also caps how much a home's assessed value can rise each year, and that cap is being tested in court. A 2024 law, House Bill 45, exempts any increase in a home's assessed value above 4% over the prior year, on the structure from tax year 2024 and on the land from 2025. In June 2026 a judge ordered the Wyoming Board of Equalization to keep enforcing the cap for now, as Cowboy State Daily reported. So the rule as applied can still change.

Owners 65 or older who have paid Wyoming property taxes for 25 years or more can take a 50% exemption on a primary residence and up to 35 acres with it. It cannot be combined with the 25% exemption, so it is one or the other. Veterans with three years of Wyoming residency and qualifying service get $6,000 of assessed value exempted, with an application due to the Assessor by the fourth Monday of May every year. The Wyoming VA loans page explains the residency wait in detail. Natrona County mailed its 2026 notices of assessment on April 27. You have 30 days from the mail date on the notice to request a review, and tax bills go out on or before October 10.

Flood, radon and wildfire: three things to check on a Casper address

Flood. Casper floods from the North Platte River through the city and from the mountain tributaries, and spring snowmelt is the main driver. The National Weather Service describes widespread flooding of the low-lying areas of Platte River Parkway when the river reaches flood stage. Properties along the river are commonly in Zone AE, FEMA's high-risk flood zone, where the map also shows how high the water is expected to reach in a major flood. Most of the rest of the city is Zone X, the lower-risk zone. For a home in the high-risk zone, the lender will require flood insurance, and that premium becomes part of your monthly payment. The flood zone that counts is the one on FEMA's current official flood map, and you can search it by address at FEMA's Map Service Center. I explain how to price flood insurance into your payment before you make an offer in buying a home in a flood zone.

Radon. Natrona County is in Zone 1 on the EPA's map of radon zones, the highest of the three zones. That means the predicted average indoor level is above the EPA's action level of 4.0 picocuries per liter. A radon test is an inexpensive part of the inspection, and it is worth doing on every home here, including new construction. Mitigation is a known fix, and the test tells you whether you need it.

Wildfire and the fire district. The Sandpiper Fire started in a rural residential area northeast of Casper on March 20, 2026, burned more than 6,200 acres and was fully contained the next day. Evacuation advisories went out for Castle Stone Drive, Stonewood Street, Ridgeview Road and South Park Road, as Wyoming Public Media reported. If you are buying outside the city limits, the Natrona County Fire Protection District covers you from two stations, one in Evansville and one on the west side of Casper. The district's budget has been tighter since 2024, so for any address outside the city, please ask your insurer for the protection class of the address. That is the fire-protection rating an insurer gives an address, and the premium is built on it. If the home has its own well and septic system, buying a home with a well and septic system covers what the lender will ask for.

Water, sewer, sales tax and closing costs in Casper

The City raised water rates 8% and sewer rates 34% on January 1, 2026, with another 8% and 18% coming on January 1, 2027, according to Oil City News. The plan behind them runs about 6.5% a year from 2029 through 2032, to replace pipes on a 100-year schedule. The average household bill was $99.58 a month and rises about $12.75, which is a line worth putting in your budget next to the mortgage payment. The water itself is about two thirds groundwater, from 29 wells in the sand and gravel beds along the North Platte River, and one third river water. As of March 2026 the City had no restrictions in place.

Casper's sales tax went back to 5% on July 1, 2026, when the one-cent specific purpose tax voters approved in 2024 ended. The 5% is the 4% state rate plus Natrona County's optional one cent. That optional cent is up for its 18th renewal on the November 3, 2026 ballot, the City of Casper's one-cent page explains. Wyoming has no state income tax and no state real estate transfer tax, and title companies commonly handle closings here rather than attorneys. The Wyoming page covers the recording fees, the title rates and the remote-signing option.

Loan limits, FHA and your mortgage in Casper

Roughly one purchase loan in four here is FHA. Of the 1,283 home-purchase loans made in the metro in 2024, 342 were FHA and 132 were VA, in the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, so FHA ran more than double the VA count. The rest, apart from three USDA loans, were conventional. That runs the other way in Cheyenne, where the Air Force base puts VA ahead of FHA. There is no military base in Natrona County, so the VA loans here go to veterans who live here, served by the Casper VA Clinic. The page on how FHA loans work covers the down payment, the mortgage insurance and the property rules. With that many Casper purchases on FHA, it is worth comparing an FHA loan with a conventional loan before you decide, and we can compare them using the same purchase price.

Prices in this market run well under the loan limits. Movoto put the county's median sold price at $305,100 in July 2026, and the 2026 conforming and FHA limits for Natrona County are in the box below this article. The conforming limit is the largest loan Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will buy in a county, and a loan above it is a jumbo loan, which conforming versus jumbo loans explains. For almost every Casper purchase, neither limit comes into play, and the question becomes which program gives you the better payment.

The property tax, the homeowners insurance, flood insurance where it is required and any association dues are all part of the monthly payment a lender qualifies you on. So the facts above feed straight into the number. Pre-approval in Wyoming covers what the letter is based on, and why the purchase contract carries so much of the cost picture in this state. Once you are ready, you can run your numbers for a Casper-area purchase, with no credit pull and no account. Choose the option that works best for you, and the application opens from there.

Nothing here is a loan approval, a denial or a commitment to lend, and it is not tax advice. The assessed value of a specific property and whether it gets an exemption are set by the Natrona County Assessor, so please confirm them with that office.

Common questions

Are FHA loans common in Casper, Wyoming?

Yes. In the 2024 federal lending data, 342 of the 1,283 home-purchase loans in the Casper metro were FHA, roughly one in four, and more than double the 132 VA loans. Most of the rest were conventional. Natrona County has no military base, so the clients using VA loans here are veterans who already live in the area, served by the Casper VA Clinic on East 2nd Street.

Does Bar Nunn still have an elementary school?

No. The Natrona County School District #1 Board of Trustees voted on November 10, 2025 to close Bar Nunn Elementary for the 2026-27 school year, citing enrollment of 156 students in a building built for 444. Please confirm with the district which school a Bar Nunn address is assigned to now.

Is I-25 through Casper under construction again?

Yes. The Walsh Drive overpass phase is finished, and the current project rebuilds the bridges over McKinley Street between mileposts 186 and 188, with one lane in each direction at 45 mph through the zone. It runs through 2028. Poplar Street also closes from CY Avenue to Collins Street each summer through 2028.

Did the Radiant Nuclear plant near Bar Nunn fall through?

Yes. In October 2025 Radiant chose Oak Ridge, Tennessee, after dropping the site north of Bar Nunn. Wyoming law allows spent fuel to be stored only at operating reactor sites, and Radiant's model stores it at the factory. Older stories about the jobs still show up in search results.

Do I need to apply for Wyoming's 25% property tax exemption in Casper?

Yes. The exemption was automatic in 2025 and had to be applied for in 2026, by affidavit with the Natrona County Assessor, for a primary residence you live in at least eight months of the year. The 2026 window opened October 1 and was extended to March 1. Please ask the Assessor for the current year's dates when you close.

Should I test for radon in a new home in Casper?

Yes. Natrona County is in the EPA's Zone 1, the highest radon zone, where the predicted average indoor level is above the action level. New construction is not exempt from that, so a radon test belongs in the inspection on any home here.

Does Casper have more than one emergency room?

Yes, two. Banner Wyoming Medical Center is the main hospital, and Summit Medical Center on the east side added a 24-hour emergency department with space for up to 12 bays. Banner's East Campus reopened in January 2026 as a specialty hospital focused on orthopedics.