Cardiff-by-the-Sea Real Estate Guide

Does Cardiff-by-the-Sea have Mello-Roos, and how much?

No community facilities district in the County Auditor's active FY 2025-26 list is named for Cardiff-by-the-Sea. That is the documented basis for saying Cardiff-by-the-Sea homes generally do not carry Mello-Roos — though it describes district names, not a guarantee for any particular parcel.

Encinitas has exactly one community facilities district in the active list, CFD No. 1, and the county's own footnote for it points at the city's Encinitas Ranch page — Encinitas Ranch is the inland development off Leucadia Boulevard, not Cardiff. What a Cardiff-by-the-Sea tax bill does carry, and an Encinitas Union one does not, is the Cardiff School District's own general obligation bond. That is an ad valorem levy voted by the district's own voters, not a Mello-Roos special tax, and the two sit on different lines of the same bill.

A Mello-Roos amount is specific to the parcel, not the neighborhood: it varies by district, improvement area and the phase a home was built in. The authoritative figure is the line item on the property tax bill, which names the district and gives a contact number.

Source: County of San Diego Auditor & Controller, Active Mello-Roos Districts (CFD) for FY 2025-2026, retrieved 2026-07-25.

What school district serves Cardiff-by-the-Sea?

Cardiff-by-the-Sea is served by Cardiff School District (K-6) and San Dieguito Union High School District. Attendance is assigned by address rather than by ZIP code, so two homes a few streets apart can feed different schools — confirm the specific address with the district before relying on it.

Which schools does Cardiff-by-the-Sea actually feed?

Cardiff-by-the-Sea has its own elementary district rather than Encinitas Union: the Cardiff School District, established in 1913 and one of the smallest districts in San Diego County, running two campuses — Cardiff School for the youngest grades and Ada Harris School through sixth. Grades seven to twelve go to San Dieguito Union High School District.

The district’s own site splits the two campuses at second and third grade, so a family here changes schools once inside the elementary years by design rather than by moving. With two campuses and no others, there is no school-choice question inside the district — which is unusual enough in this county to be worth stating.

At the high-school level Cardiff and Encinitas Union converge. San Dieguito Union’s board policy reads that “La Costa Canyon High School shall include the boundaries of the Encinitas and Cardiff school districts,” along with the area north of Escondido Creek in the Rancho Santa Fe district — and the same policy has the board setting attendance boundaries for each campus to keep enrollment balanced, which is the mechanism by which those boundaries move. The Encinitas guide covers how the city’s two elementary districts divide. District boundaries are assigned by address and are redrawn from time to time, so confirm any specific address with the district office before relying on it.

Why is there a school bond on a Cardiff-by-the-Sea property tax bill?

Cardiff-by-the-Sea sits inside a school district that carries its own general obligation bond. Measure GG, $22 million, was approved by the Cardiff School District’s voters in November 2016 with about 66 percent of the vote, and it paid to demolish and rebuild the Cardiff School campus.

A general obligation bond is not Mello-Roos. It is an ad valorem levy — a rate applied to assessed value — voted by the district’s own electorate, and it appears on the tax bill as its own named line, separate from the special taxes described further up this page.

What makes it worth knowing before an offer is that a school bond follows the district boundary and not the city line. Two homes that both say Encinitas on the envelope can sit in different elementary districts, and the bonds each district’s voters have approved are therefore different too. The tax bill names every levy on a parcel, which is the only place the answer for a specific address actually lives.

Does Cardiff-by-the-Sea have its own ZIP code?

Cardiff-by-the-Sea uses 92007, and no other part of Encinitas shares it — Leucadia, Old Encinitas and New Encinitas are all 92024. Of the five communities that incorporated as the City of Encinitas in 1986, Cardiff is the only one a ZIP code isolates.

That has a practical consequence for anyone searching. A 92007 filter returns Cardiff and nothing else; a 92024 filter averages three communities with different housing stock and, as the school answer above sets out, a different elementary district. A “92024 median” is a number about three places at once.

The other reliable tell is the street name. Cardiff streets were named for British cities — Birmingham, Oxford, Manchester — after the developer J. Frank Cullen’s wife Esther, who came from Cardiff in Wales, which is also where the community’s name comes from. Leucadia runs to Greek and Roman names for the same reason in reverse: an early developer chose a theme and it stuck.