Wilmington to Myrtle Beach is about 70 miles down US 17, and outside of summer weekend traffic you’ll do it in around an hour and a half. That distance is short enough that people ask about this drive for two very different reasons, either because they’re already booked in one place and want a day out in the other, or because they’re still choosing between the two and want to know how much difference 70 miles really makes. It makes more difference than the map suggests, so here’s what the drive is like and what you’re actually choosing between.
How far it is, and how long it actually takes
The distance lands at roughly 70 miles depending on which end of each city you measure from, and mapping tools put the non-stop driving time somewhere between about an hour and twenty minutes and an hour and forty-five. The range exists because both destinations cover a lot of ground. Leaving from Wrightsville Beach and arriving at the north end of the Grand Strand is a meaningfully shorter trip than going from downtown Wilmington to the far south end of Myrtle Beach.
Treat any of those numbers as your best case. The route runs through several towns that slow down in summer, and traffic through Shallotte and the North Myrtle Beach approach builds on weekends and around coastal events. If you’re driving down on a Saturday morning in July, when a large share of the Grand Strand’s weekly rentals are turning over at once, budget two hours and be pleasantly surprised. In October on a weekday, 80 minutes is realistic.
What the drive down US 17 is like
The trip starts by crossing the Cape Fear River on the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge, which puts you into Leland within a few minutes of leaving downtown Wilmington. From there you get a stretch of genuine freeway heading south, which ends near Winnabow at the I-140 interchange. After that, US 17 settles into what it is for the rest of the way, a two- and four-lane coastal highway that runs straight through the middle of Brunswick County.
You’re not on an interstate for most of it, so the pace is set by stoplights, turning traffic, and whatever town you’re passing through. US 17 was commissioned back in 1927 and much of the corridor still follows its original path, with older alignments through Shallotte and Bolivia now signed as US 17 Business under the street name Old Ocean Highway. Bypasses came later and piecemeal. Shallotte got its bypass in 1991, and Myrtle Beach’s own bypass opened in 1981, which is why you’ll see US 17 and US 17 Business splitting and rejoining several times over 70 miles.
Once you’re across the state line you have a real routing choice. Staying on US 17 takes you through North Myrtle Beach and down the commercial spine of the Grand Strand, which is slower but drops you closer to the oceanfront. SC 31, the Carolina Bays Parkway, runs inland as a divided highway with far fewer lights and delivers you toward the south end of Myrtle Beach. If your hotel is south of about 29th Avenue, SC 31 usually wins even though it looks longer on the map. Worth noting is that the parkway currently starts inside South Carolina. NCDOT and SCDOT are jointly planning an extension of the Carolina Bays Parkway north across the state line to US 17 in Brunswick County, but right of way for the North Carolina portion isn’t funded yet, so that’s a project for a future decade rather than a shortcut you can take now.
Where to stop, and why Calabash earns the detour
Shallotte is the practical midpoint and the natural place to break the drive, sitting on the Shallotte River with a riverwalk and the usual crossroads collection of places to eat. Coming through, you’ll choose between the bypass and the 3.8-mile business route down Main Street. The bypass is faster; Main Street is where the town actually is.
Calabash is the better stop, and it has a fun bit of history behind it. The town sits right on the South Carolina line as the southernmost town in North Carolina, and it calls itself the seafood capital of the world on its own town website. According to NCpedia, that title came from a New York Times food editor, and the town has more seafood restaurants than anywhere else its size in the country. The settlement dates to the early 1700s and was originally called Pea Landing, for the peanut crops shipped out from the river. It became Calabash in 1873, named for the drinking gourds that hung at the wells. The first of the restaurants opened in the early 1940s serving lightly battered, deep-fried shrimp, oysters, and flounder, and that style spread far enough that “Calabash-style” is now on menus in states that have never heard of the town. Local lore holds that Jimmy Durante, who ate there often in the 1940s, was talking about this place every time he signed off with “Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.”
You’ll also pass the turnoffs for the Brunswick County islands on the way down, including Holden Beach, Ocean Isle Beach, and Sunset Beach. These are quiet, largely residential beach towns with very little in the way of attractions, and they’re worth knowing about because some people who research this route discover the middle is what they wanted all along.
What Myrtle Beach is built for
Myrtle Beach is built for scale, and the numbers make that plain without any editorializing. Visit Myrtle Beach, the area’s official tourism bureau, reports over 17 million visitors a year across the Grand Strand, which runs 60 miles and takes in 14 communities from Little River down to Pawleys Island. There are approximately 425 hotels and 157,000 accommodation units, around 2,000 full-service restaurants, more than 80 championship golf courses hosting roughly 3.2 million rounds a year, and seven live theaters seating more than 7,300 people between them.
What that buys you is density of things to do. The Myrtle Beach Boardwalk runs 1.2 miles from the 14th Avenue North pier to the 2nd Avenue pier, split between a quieter stretch along the beach and an entertainment stretch full of shops, arcades, and restaurants. The SkyWheel anchors it at 187 feet, with 42 enclosed climate-controlled gondolas that run year round, and it’s marking its 15th anniversary in 2026. The Gay Dolphin, billed as the largest gift shop in America, is on the same stretch. Broadway at the Beach sits about two blocks inland with more attractions, theaters, and restaurants. Summer evenings bring Hot Summer Nights programming and fireworks along the boardwalk.
If your idea of a beach vacation involves the kids having somewhere to go after dinner, a golf trip built around tee times, or a big oceanfront resort with a lazy river, Myrtle Beach is built for exactly that, and the 17 million annual visitors are the evidence.
How a Wilmington beach trip is set up
The Wilmington side works differently. Its tourism bureau describes the area as one destination and four settings, which is a fair description of what you get. There’s a historic downtown on the Cape Fear River with a walkable district of restaurants, bars, and 19th-century architecture, and then three island beaches that each have their own personality. Wrightsville Beach is the active one, built around surfing, paddling, and the loop walk. Carolina Beach has the vintage boardwalk, a state park, and a working fishing scene. Kure Beach is the quietest of the three, with a historic fort, an oceanfront park, and the oldest fishing pier on the East Coast.
The Wilmington bureau doesn’t publish visitor counts or accommodation totals the way Myrtle Beach does, and the scale comparison was never the useful one anyway. Wilmington is a mid-sized river city that happens to have beaches attached, so your evenings tend to look like a downtown dinner, and your beach days get spread across three towns instead of one long strand. Our guide to how Wrightsville fits the three-island lineup covers how those beaches differ from one another, and if you’re weighing where to base yourself, the where to stay near Wilmington’s beaches rundown gets into the tradeoffs between the islands and downtown.
Day trip, split stay, or just pick one
For most people the answer is to pick one and stay put, because 90 minutes each way turns into three hours of driving and you’ll spend a good chunk of a vacation day in the car. If you’re staying at Wilmington’s beaches and the pull is specifically the boardwalk, the SkyWheel, or Broadway at the Beach, then a day trip makes sense. Leave early, aim for North Myrtle Beach or the north end of the Grand Strand rather than the far south, and you’ll cut 20 minutes off each leg. If a shorter outing would scratch the same itch, the ferry to Southport is a half-day trip from the Wilmington beaches that costs about seven dollars a carload.
Splitting the stay is the underrated option, particularly for a longer trip or a group that wants different things. A few nights in Myrtle Beach for the attractions and a few in Wilmington for the historic downtown and the quieter beaches gives you two genuinely different weeks compressed into one, and the transfer between them is a 90-minute drive with a seafood lunch in the middle. Timing matters more than most people expect here, since the same drive that takes 80 minutes in October takes two hours in July, and our month-by-month look at when to visit covers how the crowds and rates shift through the year on the Wilmington side.
FAQs
Are there any tolls between Wilmington and Myrtle Beach?
No. The whole route is untolled, and the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge at the Wilmington end is free to cross. The one thing worth knowing is that NCDOT is working through a replacement for that bridge, and because only about a third of the projected $1.1 billion cost is currently funded, tolling the new bridge is on the table as the way to cover the rest. Nothing has been decided, the design itself hasn’t been selected yet, and any charge would be years out. It doesn’t affect a trip you take this year.
Can you fly between Wilmington and Myrtle Beach instead of driving?
Both cities have airports, ILM in Wilmington and MYR in Myrtle Beach, but there’s no useful way to fly between them. Any itinerary you find will connect through Charlotte or Atlanta and eat most of a day, which is a lot of trouble for 70 miles. If you’re flying into the region from somewhere else, the more useful question is which airport to land at, and that comes down to which destination you’re spending the most nights in. The drive between them is easy enough that either airport works for a trip that touches both.
Is there a bus or shuttle between Wilmington and Myrtle Beach?
Nothing frequent or direct enough to plan a day trip around. Intercity carriers serve both cities, but routes and schedules on this corridor change often and usually involve a connection, so check current options with the carriers themselves rather than assuming a same-day round trip exists. For a visitor without a car, a rental for the day is generally the more reliable move.
Booking the trip you actually want
Start with what you want your evenings to look like, because that’s where these two places diverge the most. An arcade, a Ferris wheel lit up over the water, and somewhere for everyone to go after dinner points you south to Myrtle Beach. A walk along the riverfront, dinner in a building older than the state’s highway system, and a beach that empties out by seven points you to Wilmington. Whichever you book, the 70 miles between them means you’re never locked out of the other one, so keep the drive in your back pocket for a day when the weather turns or somebody in the group needs a change of scenery. Get a shrimp basket in Calabash on the way, either direction.
