On February 1, 2012, the readers of Budget Travel Magazine voted Beaufort America's Coolest Small Town. The honor surprised no one who had spent an afternoon walking Front Street, where preserved 18th- and 19th-century homes line the brick sidewalks and shrimp boats tie up alongside sailing yachts in the working harbor. Beaufort sits as the county seat of Carteret County, founded in 1709, making it the third-oldest town in the state after Bath and New Bern. It has 4,464 residents as of the 2020 census. In 2015 the town was named a Tree City USA by the Arbor Day Foundation for its commitment to urban forest management, which means the live oaks shading those brick sidewalks are official, not just historic.

Beaufort knows what its history is and leans into it. The Beaufort Pirate Invasion is an annual costumed festival commemorating the town's golden-age-of-piracy connections. The Beaufort Music Festival, the Wooden Boat Show at the North Carolina Maritime Museum, the BARTA Fishing Tournament, the Wine and Food Festival: the calendar fills with the kind of events that a small coastal town generates when it takes its identity seriously. The Maritime Museum on Front Street holds artifacts recovered from Queen Anne's Revenge, including cannons, cooking pots, and the broken pottery that survived three centuries on the seafloor.

The name Beaufort appears all over the world. According to Beaufort Sister Cities, Inc., the town has nineteen sister cities, every one of them also called Beaufort. There are nine Beauforts in France alone, with Beaufort, Haute-Garonne, Beaufort, Herault, Beaufort-en-Vallee, Beaufort-sur-Doron, and others spread across the country. There is Beaufort in County Kerry, Ireland, Beaufort in Luxembourg, Beaufort in Sabah, Malaysia, Beaufort, Victoria, Australia, Beaufort West in South Africa, Beaufort in Wales. The North Carolina town is technically pronounced BO-furt, a different way from South Carolina's BYOO-furt; both descend from the same English ducal title.

Getting to Beaufort means US 70 from the west and NC 101 from the north. The town's airport, Michael J. Smith Field (KMRH), is named for the astronaut killed in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986; Smith was born in Beaufort and graduated from East Carteret High School north of town. The field handles general aviation traffic for the whole Crystal Coast. Beaufort hosts the Carteret County main public library and serves as the educational center for the area, with Beaufort Middle School and the charter Tiller School in town. Across Pivers Island sits the Duke University Marine Laboratory and other research stations that draw scientists studying the rich ecology of the sound and the estuaries beyond.