The four Cape Hatteras campgrounds, compared for RVs

All of them. The seashore runs four NPS campgrounds, all take RVs — Oregon Inlet, Cape Point, Frisco and Ocracoke — and every one of the four has tent, trailer and RV sites. That is the easy half of the answer. The useful half is that they are not four versions of the same campground: they differ in size, in price, in season, and in the single feature that matters most to a rig, which is whether anything plugs in.

The details

Oregon Inlet is the northern one and the only one that is not a purely off-grid proposition. It carries 107 sites, of which 47 sites with electricity and water, and it is the only seashore campground with utility connections of any kind. Pricing splits accordingly: $28 / $35 hookup, which is $28 for a no-utilities site and $35 for a hookup site. It is open year round, it has heated showers where the others do not, and its Highway 12, Nags Head mailing address puts it just south of the bridge on the Bodie Island side — the shortest drive from the northern beaches by a wide margin.

Cape Point is the biggest and the cheapest. 202 sites, $20 — 202 sites at $20 a night, no hookups — at 46700 Lighthouse Road in Buxton, open spring through fall. It sits behind the dune line near the lighthouse at the elbow of the island, which is the most exposed ground of the four and also the closest to the point itself. For a self-contained rig that does not need power, it is the best value on the seashore and the largest chance of finding space late.

Frisco is the one with terrain. 127 sites, $28 — 127 sites at $28, no hookups, spring through fall — laid out in dunes rather than on a flat pad, which produces sites with genuine character and sites that are genuinely awkward to level. If you are in a long fifth-wheel, read the site descriptions rather than the map. If you are in something short, this is the campground people come back to.

Ocracoke is the outlier, and the only other year-round option. 136 sites, $28, year round — 136 sites at $28, no hookups, open all year — on Irvin Garrish Highway, reached only by boat. Everything about the logistics is different: you arrive on a ferry, the village is small, and resupply is not a fifteen-minute drive. It is also the quietest of the four in the shoulder months, which is exactly why people plan around it.

Two rules apply across all four and they catch people out equally. Booking is recreation.gov only — online only, rangers cannot take any form of payment in the campground — so a rig that rolls up hoping to pay at a kiosk is a rig with nowhere to sleep. And occupancy is capped at two vehicles, six persons per site, with a pop-up camper counting as one of the two vehicles. A coach, a towed car and a pop-up is three vehicles and one site too few.

Choosing between them comes down to one question asked honestly: can your rig run for several days on its own batteries and propane? If yes, price and location decide it, and Cape Point at $20 is hard to argue with. If no — if there is a resident who needs a CPAP, a medical fridge, or air conditioning that has to run — then the answer is Oregon Inlet or nowhere on this seashore, and those 47 sites are the scarcest inventory on the island.

Four campgrounds, one of them wired and three of them not, at $20 to $35 a night. Decide the power question first and the rest of the choice makes itself.