Living in Mountain Top, PA — Ridge-Top Living Above the Valley

Start with the thing that trips up every search: Mountain Top is a place, not a municipality. It is a census-designated place strung along Pennsylvania Route 309 south of Wilkes-Barre, and it spreads across four separate townships — Dorrance, Fairview, Rice and Wright. There is no Mountain Top borough council and no Mountain Top tax bill. Which township a house sits in determines its taxes and its municipal services, so that is the first question to ask about any listing here.

The CDP held 11,489 residents at the 2020 Census. What people are buying is the elevation: this is ridge country above the Wyoming Valley, with the valley’s jobs and hospitals a short run down 309 and the Pocono state parks out the back door.

Food & Drink

La Napoli is the local anchor — best known for pizza, but also serving Italian dishes, cheesesteaks and burgers. At the entrance to the Wright Township dog park you will find two more locally owned fixtures: Abe’s Hot Dogs and Malacari’s Ice Cream, which also runs mini golf.

Things to Do

Wright Township Recreation Park is the center of local life and it is genuinely well equipped for a township park — roughly 35 acres holding four tennis courts, two blacktop basketball courts, a baseball field, two soccer fields, an ice hockey rink, a playground, a splash fountain and a public dog park, with trails running through the surrounding woods.

Outdoors & Parks

This is the real argument for living up here. Nescopeck State Park and Hickory Run State Park are both close, Pinchot State Forest wraps the ridges, and the Francis E. Walter Dam draws paddlers and anglers. Between them you get hundreds of miles of trail, lake and river access without leaving Luzerne County’s southern edge.

Schools

Mountain Top is served by the Crestwood School District, whose teams play as the Comets. Crestwood is geographically enormous — more than 110 square miles covering nine municipalities: Dennison, Dorrance, Fairview, Rice, Slocum and Wright townships plus Nuangola, White Haven and Penn Lake boroughs.

The district runs four buildings, and where they sit matters if you are weighing a commute: Rice Elementary School in Rice Township, Fairview Elementary School in Fairview Township, and both Crestwood Middle School and Crestwood High School in Wright Township.

School Performance

State assessment results for the high school serving Mountain Top, from the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s Future Ready PA Index, 2024–25 school year:

• Crestwood Secondary Campus — Keystone Literature 55.7% proficient or advanced (statewide 49.9%) · Keystone Algebra I 47.6% (statewide 41.7%) · four-year graduation rate 97.2% (statewide 88.0%)

Source: Pennsylvania Department of Education, Future Ready PA Index, 2024–25. We publish these same three measures, from this same source, on every community page in this guide.

Everyday Essentials

Weis is the largest grocery store in Mountain Top, alongside independent grocers and pharmacies along the 309 corridor. For anything bigger — hospitals, big-box retail, the airport — the full Wilkes-Barre lineup is down the mountain.

The Homes

Mountain Top carries the highest price point of any community in this guide, and by a wide margin. Trackers put the market in the upper $300,000s to low $400,000s through 2026, with homes taking roughly 70 days to sell — a slower, higher-priced market than the valley floor below it. Two cautions on the numbers you will find online: ZIP-code figures for 18707 spill past the CDP boundary, and because this is a comparatively small market, year-over-year percentage swings can be dramatic without meaning much. Judge it street by street.

The stock skews newer and more suburban than the coal-era boroughs below — detached singles on real lots, spread across four townships with meaningfully different tax rates.