South Carolina Short-Term Rental Regulations: A 2026 Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in South Carolina and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that in most of the state, you can. There's no statewide ban standing between you and your first guest, and South Carolina hasn't passed any law handing cities the power to prohibit short-term rentals outright, at least not yet. You do need a state Retail License for tax purposes unless a platform handles every booking for you, but that's a fifty-dollar form, not a real barrier.

The catch is that South Carolina isn't one rulebook. It's whichever city or county your address happens to sit in, and that answer swings from "nothing at all" to "good luck getting in." Charleston caps most residential properties at one short-term rental unit and won't grant a permit unless the structure is individually listed on the National Register or at least fifty years old, depending on which part of the peninsula you're in. Mount Pleasant, right across the harbor, has gone further still: as of my last check, its 2026 renewal window is closed, existing permit holders keep operating, and anyone applying new gets put on a waiting list instead of a permit. Neither of those is a fringe example, either. They're two of the most popular coastal markets in the state.

So this guide covers what's genuinely statewide, meaning the tax layers, the Retail License, the pending legislation, and what South Carolina's own agencies actually require, then points you toward the city and county guides where the real variation lives. Every figure below comes from a South Carolina statute, an SCDOR page, or a city's own site, checked in July 2026. Assuming you're weighing a South Carolina property against a market with simpler rules, run both through BNBCalc first.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in South Carolina?

Running that comparison only works if you know what "South Carolina rules" actually means, and the honest answer is that the state itself barely shows up in the picture.

Start with what's not there, since South Carolina has no statewide law that either preempts local short-term rental ordinances or protects a host's right to operate one. Two competing bills sitting in committee right now show exactly why that gap matters. H.3861 would bar any city, county or political subdivision from prohibiting short-term rentals altogether, punishing a violating jurisdiction by pulling its property-tax assessment ratio and withholding state aid. S.442 pulls the opposite direction: it affirms that municipalities and counties can regulate, and even prohibit, short-term rentals, while setting a statewide baseline of registration, $1 million liability insurance and inspection standards. Both bills are still sitting in committee as of my last check, so neither is law, and until one of them moves, the default stays exactly where it's always been: your city or county decides.

A narrower statute does apply everywhere, though it's landlord-tenant law rather than land-use law. The South Carolina Vacation Rental Act, Title 27 Chapter 50, covers written rental agreements, how a rental management company has to hold your guests' advance payments in trust, evacuation-order compliance, and disclosure requirements if you sell a property under an active rental agreement. It doesn't touch zoning or permitting at all, so complying with it gets you nowhere with a city's rules.

What is statewide is the tax side. Book directly instead of through a platform that pays the state for you, and you'll need a Retail License from the South Carolina Department of Revenue, issued as an Accommodations Tax License once you're renting rooms. That requirement, and the 7% state accommodations tax that comes with it, apply the same way whether you're in downtown Columbia or on a barrier island. Zoning is where the state steps back completely and hands the decision to hundreds of individual municipalities and counties, and that's the layer that actually decides whether you can operate at all.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in South Carolina

Since zoning is the layer that decides whether you can operate at all, that's also where you should start, not with the state paperwork. Before you buy a property or list one you already own, call your city or county's planning department and ask directly whether short-term rentals are permitted at your address and under which zoning district. Don't assume nearby towns behave the same way, since Mount Pleasant and Charleston sit on either side of the same harbor and still land in genuinely different places, which our Mount Pleasant guide walks through in detail.

The upstate looks nothing like the coast either, and the permitting reflects it: our Greenville County guide covers a market built around a growing tech corridor and Clemson football weekends, worlds away from what Charleston or Mount Pleasant deals with.

Once you know what your specific city or county requires, a handful of steps stay the same everywhere in the state:

• Read your HOA covenants or deed restrictions. Nothing in state or local law overrides a private HOA ban on short-term rentals, and this trips up more owners than the actual ordinance does.
• Decide whether you're booking directly or exclusively through a platform. That choice determines whether you need your own Retail License from SCDOR.
• Register for a business license with your city or county if it requires one, on top of any short-term rental permit.
• Check whether your building needs a certificate of occupancy specific to short-term use. Several South Carolina cities, Mount Pleasant among them, require one before they'll issue a permit at all.

None of that requires you to hold a state license yet, though. That part has its own section below, and it's worth reading closely, because the fee doesn't come back.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in South Carolina

That fee belongs to the Retail License, or once you're renting rooms, the Accommodations Tax License, and it's the one requirement that applies no matter which city you're in.

SCDOR requires it if you're not exclusively booked through Airbnb, Vrbo or a similar marketplace facilitator, and the fee is $50, paid once through MyDORWAY and non-refundable. Unlike most licenses, it doesn't sit on a fixed renewal clock. It stays valid for as long as you keep operating at that address, and you only have to reapply if ownership changes or the property goes 24 consecutive months without a single booking. Two things let you skip it, though. If a platform handles every one of your bookings, the platform holds the license and sends the tax in for you, and if you rent a room for no more than one week per calendar quarter, you don't need the license at all, though SCDOR still expects you to file and pay the tax every year.

That's the entire state-level requirement. Everything past it is local, and "local" in South Carolina can mean a genuinely serious application. Charleston requires both a short-term rental permit and a business license in every case, charges a $200 zoning and application review fee plus separate fire-inspection fees that scale with the number of floors, and caps most residential properties at one rental unit. On the peninsula, your building generally has to be individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places or be at least fifty years old before the city will even consider the application, and permits have to be renewed every year by the original issue date. Mount Pleasant requires the same permit-plus-business-license combination, plus a certificate of occupancy specific to short-term use, and as of my last check its 2026 renewal window was closed, with new applicants placed on a waiting list rather than issued a permit outright.

Keep in mind that none of this is fixed. S.442 would layer a statewide baseline on top of whatever your city already requires, including a designated local responsible party, occupancy and density limits, inspection standards, $1 million in liability insurance, and licensing a city could suspend or revoke. It's still sitting in Senate Judiciary, so none of that applies yet, but it's worth watching if you're planning a purchase that depends on today's lighter rules staying exactly as they are.

Required Documents for South Carolina Short-Term Rentals

Assuming today's rules hold, the paperwork you actually need splits cleanly into two piles: what the state wants and what your city wants, and the two don't overlap much.

At the state level, SCDOR's MyDORWAY portal asks for the basics: your business or personal information, a Social Security number or federal EIN, the property address, and how you're structured, whether that's a sole proprietorship, an LLC or something else. There's no separate document upload beyond that.

Your city is where the real document list lives, and it varies enough that you should pull your specific municipality's checklist rather than assume it matches a neighbor's:

• Proof of ownership or a lease showing you're allowed to sublet, plus a copy of your government-issued ID.
• A certificate of occupancy for short-term use, required in Mount Pleasant and several other South Carolina municipalities before a permit gets issued.
• Historic-designation or building-age documentation, which Charleston requires for peninsula properties depending on which permit category you fall into.
• A floor plan or site plan, used for the fire and parking review that comes with a short-term rental permit in cities that run one.
• A signed acknowledgment that your HOA or deed restrictions allow it, even though this isn't a government form. Don't skip it, since an HOA ban overrides a valid city permit every time.

Do check your specific city's page before you start collecting any of this, because a document that satisfies one South Carolina municipality won't necessarily satisfy the next one over.

South Carolina Short-Term Rental Taxes

Once the paperwork's approved and you're actually taking bookings, tax is where three separate authorities all want a piece, and they don't collect it the same way.

Charge	Rate	Collected by
State sales tax	5%	South Carolina Department of Revenue
State accommodations tax	2%	South Carolina Department of Revenue
Local accommodations tax	up to 3%	Your city or county directly
Local sales and use tax add-ons	varies by county	South Carolina Department of Revenue

The first two rows combine into a single 7% state accommodations tax under S.C. Code § 12-36-920, charged on gross proceeds from renting rooms or lodgings to a guest staying under 90 continuous days. Airbnb and Vrbo count as marketplace facilitators under § 12-36-71, so they collect that 7% automatically on any booking made through their platform and pay it to the state themselves. Book exclusively through one of them, and you never have to register or collect it yourself.

The local accommodations tax works differently, and this is where hosts get caught out. It's administered directly by your city or county under S.C. Code §§ 6-1-500 to 540, not by SCDOR, and whether Airbnb or Vrbo collects it automatically depends entirely on whether that platform has an agreement with your specific local government. There's no statewide guarantee. Local sales and use tax add-ons stack on top of the general state rate too, and they vary by county, so pull the current combined figure for your address from SCDOR's own rate lookup rather than assume a number here.

A few exemptions cut the other way, and they're worth knowing before you assume the full 7% hits everything you earn. Stays of 90 continuous days or more fall outside the "transient" definition entirely, and so does an owner-occupied property with fewer than six sleeping rooms that you manage yourself, without a rental agency or online platform. Rental income wholly excluded from gross income under Internal Revenue Code § 280A(g), the under-15-days-a-year federal carve-out sometimes called the Masters exemption near golf-tournament markets, escapes it too. Your rental income is still ordinary taxable income on top of all of that, subject to the usual federal and South Carolina income tax, and SCDOR's sales tax division has no role in that side of things.

Does South Carolina Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

The state stays almost entirely out of that side too, since income tax runs through a different division, and enforcement of the actual operating rules happens exclusively at the local level in South Carolina, because there's no statewide agency doing it.

Mount Pleasant's closed 2026 renewal window is about as concrete as enforcement gets. Applying doesn't get you a permit anymore, it gets you a spot on a list. Charleston backs its rules with an annual renewal requirement, a fire inspection tied to your floor count, and a one-unit-per-property cap that's checked at the application stage rather than left to a complaint. Watch out if you're assuming a city with no ordinance on the books means no enforcement at all, either. Plenty of smaller South Carolina towns simply haven't written a short-term rental ordinance yet, which means your only real check is the underlying zoning code and whatever a neighbor decides to report.

Tax enforcement is a separate, and genuinely serious, track. SCDOR can audit accommodations tax filings the same way it audits any sales tax return, and unpaid tax accrues interest and penalties regardless of whether your city ever inspects the property itself. Remember that a platform collecting the state's 7% on your behalf doesn't cover the local accommodations tax unless that platform has an agreement with your specific city or county, so check that before you assume you're fully covered.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in South Carolina

Assuming you've weighed all of that and you're still in, the order below actually saves you time and keeps you from paying a non-refundable fee for a property that was never going to qualify.

1. Confirm zoning allows it at your address. Call your city or county planning department directly and ask which zoning district your property sits in and whether short-term rentals are permitted there.
2. Check your HOA covenants and deed restrictions. An HOA ban trumps a valid city permit, so this comes before you spend money on anything else.
3. Decide whether you'll book directly or exclusively through a platform. That decision determines whether you need your own SCDOR Retail License.
4. Apply for the Retail or Accommodations Tax License through MyDORWAY if you need one, and budget for the non-refundable $50 fee.
5. Apply for your local permit and business license, gathering whatever documents your city requires: certificate of occupancy, historic or age documentation, floor plans, and HOA sign-off.
6. Set up your tax collection. Confirm which taxes your booking platform collects automatically and register separately for whichever ones it doesn't.
7. Post any required signage or registration numbers, and keep the records your city or SCDOR could ask for.
8. Diarize your renewal dates. Charleston renews annually, and Mount Pleasant's current waitlist situation shows how quickly a market can tighten between one renewal cycle and the next.
9. Keep an eye on Columbia. H.3861, S.442 and H.3876 are all still moving, and any one of them could change your city's rules before your next renewal comes around.

Who to Contact in South Carolina about Short-Term Rental Regulations and Zoning

Diarizing all of that only helps if you know exactly who to call when something changes, and in South Carolina that list splits fairly cleanly between state tax questions and local zoning ones.

State accommodations tax

The South Carolina Department of Revenue administers the Retail License, the Accommodations Tax License, and the state 7% accommodations tax.

• Phone: 803-898-5970
• Email: [email protected]
• Mailing address: South Carolina Department of Revenue, Sales Tax, PO Box 125, Columbia, SC 29214-0400
• Hours: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Wednesday, 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; closed weekends and state holidays
• Apply: MyDORWAY

Columbia is also the seat of Richland County, and our Richland County guide covers what the capital's own zoning and permitting rules require, separately from the state agency headquartered there.

Local zoning, permits and business licenses

These questions belong to your specific city or county, and the difference in how they're staffed says a lot about how seriously each one takes it. Charleston's Citizen Services Desk, at 50 Broad Street, Charleston, SC 29401 (843-724-7311), handles short-term rental permit questions alongside everything else the city runs. Mount Pleasant, by contrast, has a dedicated Short-Term Rental Coordinator: Jane Yager-Baumrind, at [email protected] or 843-884-1229, with the Business License Division reachable separately at 843-849-2786. If your property sits somewhere else in the state, our Lexington County guide and North Charleston guide cover two more of South Carolina's larger markets, and each guide in this series lists the specific planning or business license office to call for that jurisdiction.

Tracking pending legislation

For the current status of H.3861, S.442 or H.3876, the South Carolina Legislature's own bill-tracking pages are more current than any secondhand summary, this one included.

What Do Airbnb Hosts in South Carolina on Reddit and Bigger Pockets Think about Local Regulations?

Tracking three bills yourself is a lot to ask, which is roughly the same complaint hosts raise everywhere this topic comes up.

I wasn't able to pull Reddit threads directly for this guide. Reddit blocks automated access, and its developer policy restricts the kind of commercial data use a piece like this would need, so consider what follows a read of the recurring public themes rather than a structured survey. BiggerPockets is reachable, though, and I read it directly for this piece, which makes it a fair proxy for the investor side of that conversation.

• Coastal owners talk about caps and waitlists, not outright bans. The consistent theme in Charleston- and Mount Pleasant-adjacent discussion isn't that short-term rentals are illegal, it's that getting a new permit has gotten genuinely hard, and existing owners increasingly treat a held permit as an asset that transfers with the sale of the house.
• Upstate and inland hosts describe a much lighter touch. Markets like Greenville County, our Rock Hill guide, and Lexington County come up as places where the barrier to entry stays close to the state's baseline: a Retail License and a local business license, rather than a capped permit system.
• Investors on BiggerPockets consistently flag the same due-diligence step. Call the planning department before you make an offer, not after, because a strict local ordinance can turn a promising number on paper into a property you can't legally operate the way you modeled it.
• The pending legislation gets discussed as a wildcard, not a plan to build around. Whichever of H.3861 or S.442 eventually moves, and in whichever direction, it changes the math for owners in both restrictive and permissive cities, so treat neither as settled until one of them actually passes.

Take that last point seriously regardless of where in the state you're looking. South Carolina's short-term rental rules are being actively rewritten in Columbia this session, and a rule that feels stable today can flip within one legislative cycle. Run the real numbers before you commit to any property, using BNBCalc's South Carolina market data to check revenue and occupancy at the market level instead of a best-case guess. The address decides almost everything here, more than in most states, so get that part settled before you get attached to a number on a spreadsheet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in South Carolina in 2026?

Yes, in most of the state. South Carolina has no statewide ban and no state law stopping a city from allowing short-term rentals. You'll generally need a Retail License, or Accommodations Tax License, from the South Carolina Department of Revenue unless a platform handles every booking for you, plus whatever permit or business license your specific city or county requires. Some markets, like Charleston and Mount Pleasant, cap how many new permits they issue, so confirm local rules before you buy or list.

Does South Carolina require a statewide short-term rental license?

No. There's no dedicated statewide short-term rental license or registry. What South Carolina does require is a Retail License from the Department of Revenue for anyone taking bookings directly, which costs $50 and is issued as an Accommodations Tax License once you're renting rooms. You're exempt if you rent exclusively through a marketplace facilitator like Airbnb or Vrbo, since the platform holds that license and remits the tax on your behalf.

What taxes does a South Carolina short-term rental owe?

A combined 7% state accommodations tax applies to gross rental proceeds under S.C. Code § 12-36-920, split into a 5% sales tax and a 2% accommodations tax. Local governments can add their own accommodations tax of up to 3%, plus county sales and use tax add-ons that vary by location. Airbnb and Vrbo automatically collect and remit the state 7% under South Carolina's marketplace facilitator law, but local accommodations tax collection depends on whether the platform has an agreement with your specific city or county.

Does every city in South Carolina allow short-term rentals?

No, and the rules vary sharply by address. Some cities have no short-term rental ordinance at all, so zoning and a state Retail License are the only requirements. Others regulate tightly: Charleston caps most properties at one rental unit and requires permit renewal every year, and Mount Pleasant has closed its 2026 permit window to new applicants, placing them on a waiting list instead. Always confirm the rules with your specific city or county planning department before buying or listing a property.

Is South Carolina about to pass a statewide short-term rental law?

Not yet, but three bills are moving through the legislature. H.3861 would preempt local bans entirely, S.442 would affirm local control while adding a statewide baseline of registration, inspections and $1 million in liability insurance, and H.3876, the furthest along, would require booking platforms to collect and remit accommodations tax statewide and had cleared Senate Finance with amendments as of May 2026. None had passed as of this guide's last verification.

Last verified: July 2026. Every ordinance, tax rate, state law, and contact detail in this guide links to or comes from its official source.