A South Carolina salt marsh at low tide with a winding tidal creek and exposed pluff mud banks, backed by live oaks hung with Spanish moss and cabbage palmetto.
Georgetown County One statewide code, county design maps

Barndominium Builders in Georgetown County, SC

Georgetown County is two counties wearing one name, and knowing which one your parcel is in decides almost everything about the build. East of the Waccamaw River is the Waccamaw Neck — Pawleys Island, Litchfield, Murrells Inlet, DeBordieu — where the land is priced as beachfront and there is effectively none of it to farm. West and north of the river is the other Georgetown County: Andrews, Hemingway, Plantersville, Choppee, the Sampit and Black River bottoms, and the Pee Dee side that shares a line with Williamsburg and Marion. The county's own tree ordinance draws exactly that line, splitting the county into an urban Waccamaw Neck overlay and a rural overlay covering everything else. Three facts shape a barndominium here more than any others. The South Carolina Building Codes Council's Georgetown sheet is one of only two county maps in the entire state carrying a 150 MPH wind contour — Charleston's is the other — and it letters three seismic design categories across the county. The county adopted a Wetland Protection Ordinance on 23 June 2026 whose own findings put 249,336 acres of wetland inside the county, 48 percent of the land area. And Georgetown is one of the eight counties named in the statute that defines South Carolina's coastal zone, which is a legal fact rather than a geographic impression. The agricultural base is small and getting smaller — 63,303 acres in farms, 12.2 percent of the county, down 21 percent in five years — so the honest version of this page is that the land here is bought one tract at a time, on the western side, and the septic evaluation and the wetland delineation come before the offer.

Georgetown County at a glance

County
Georgetown County
Population
65,912
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Building conditions in Georgetown County

The building code is the same in every South Carolina county: S.C. Code § 6-9-10(A) requires each municipality and county to enforce the Building Codes Council's codes and to enforce only those, and SC Regulation 8-236(C) bars a local jurisdiction from writing one of its own. The design numbers are not local either, but they are not one number for the state — Regulations 8-1202 and 8-1203 send wind and seismic to the Council's own map for this county, and those maps are drawn as contours, so the figure is read at your address rather than off a county name. What is genuinely local is who issues the permit and inspects the work, what that office charges, the permit procedure it adopted by ordinance, whether your parcel is zoned at all, and the rest of Table R301.2 — frost depth, termite probability and flood — which the jurisdiction fills in for itself.

Build conditions for Georgetown County , South Carolina : design wind speed The Building Codes Council's Georgetown County sheet, Georgetown 15(Mays).pdf, carries a single blue wind contour labelled 150 MPH at both ends - one of only two county sheets in South Carolina carrying a 150 mph line, the other being Charleston's - together with eight seismic design category labels lettered on both sides of the category boundaries: C, D0, D0 and D1 across the upper half of the sheet and D0, D1, D0 and C across the lower half. BUILD CONDITIONS GEORGETOWN COUNTY…Georgetown CountyONE STATEWIDE CODEDESIGN WIND SPEEDThe Building Codes…Modifications IRC 2021-04 and IRC 2021-05 replace IRC R301.2.1 and R301.2.2.1 with the SouthCarolina Building Codes Council's own previously published county maps, and Georgetown is one of…ZONING · FA/R (FOREST AGRICULTURE/RESIDENTIAL)1 acre, 100 ft minimum lot width at…The Zoning Ordinance's enacting clause makes it effective "in thoseunincorporated portions of Georgetown County as designated on the…DEVELOPMENT IMPACT FEE, RESIDENTIAL, PER DWEL…$3,271 for a dwelling of 2,501 to 3…That is one of thirteen residential bands on the county's publishedImpact Fee Calculation Schedule, and it is the sum of its three…WHO ISSUES THE PERMITGeorgetown County Building Department129 Screven Street, Room 249, Georgetown SC 29440; P.O. Drawer421270, Georgetown SC 29440; 843-545-3116, inspection line…
Build conditions for Georgetown County, drawn from the sourced facts on this page. Every figure above is cited in the quick-facts panel below, with its source and vintage.
One of only two Council maps in South Carolina carrying a 150 MPH contour
South Carolina takes the wind speed and the seismic design category away from the locality and away from the national code maps. Modifications IRC 2021-04 and IRC 2021-05 replace IRC Sections R301.2.1 and R301.2.2.1 with "the previously published maps by the South Carolina Building Codes Council," and those maps exist for thirty-five of the state's forty-six counties. Georgetown is one of them, and its sheet is unusual. Downloaded from the Council's own map library and read from its text layer, Georgetown 15(Mays).pdf carries a single blue wind contour labelled 150 MPH at both ends, plus the Council's standard note box: "Wind speed, shown in miles per hour, applies at all points along the length of its corresponding (blue) line. Interpolation between wind speed lines is determined by the AHJ as permitted by Figure R301.2(4)(A) of the 2015 International Residential Code." Only two county sheets in the whole state carry a 150 mph line — Georgetown's and Charleston's. The seismic side is drawn the same way, as boundaries with the category lettered on each side: the sheet's text layer carries eight labels, C, D0, D0, D1 in its upper half and D0, D1, D0, C in its lower half, so a Georgetown parcel can read C, D0 or D1 depending on where it sits. That spread is the consequential half. The residential code applies its seismic provisions to a detached one- or two-family dwelling only at D0, D1 and D2, so one Georgetown tract is outside the code's seismic chapter and the tract down the road is inside it, with continuous footings under exterior walls, reinforced footings and stem walls, and plate washers on the anchor bolts. Get the reading for your own tax map number from the county building official in writing before anyone prices a frame. One thing not to infer from the 150 figure on its own: IRC R301.2.1.1's 140 mph limb is qualified by the words "in a special wind region," no South Carolina county is established as a special wind region, and every South Carolina jurisdiction found publishing a completed Table R301.2 records "No" in that cell.

SC Building Codes Council, "Wind/Seismic Maps", https://llr.sc.gov/bcc/maps.aspx ; the Georgetown County sheet at https://llr.sc.gov/bcc/PDFfiles/WSMaps/Georgetown%2015(Mays).pdf (application/pdf, 3,744,677 bytes, downloaded 8 September 2026; the note box, the two "150 MPH" labels and all eight "C", "D0" and "D1" labels were read from the sheet's own text layer in both layout and reading-order extraction modes, which agree); the substituting modifications at SC Building Codes Council, 2021 Modification Index, https://llr.sc.gov/bcc/PDFfiles/2021-Modification-index.pdf

Georgetown is on the coastal-zone list by statute — and the Critical Area is a feature, not the county line
This is settled by the definition clause of a statute rather than by looking at a map, and the distinction saves a permit cycle. S.C. Code § 48-39-10(B) defines the coastal zone and then names it: "These counties are Beaufort, Berkeley, Charleston, Colleton, Dorchester, Horry, Jasper, and Georgetown." A closed list of eight, and Georgetown is the last name on it. What being on the list does not mean is that every acre in the county needs a coastal permit. The Critical Area is defined separately at § 48-39-10(J) as four things and only four: "(1) coastal waters; (2) tidelands; (3) beaches; (4) beach/dune system which is the area from the mean high-water mark to the setback line as determined in Section 48-39-280." Tidelands are defined at § 48-39-10(G) as areas at or below mean high tide plus the coastal wetlands, mudflats and shallows contiguous or adjacent to coastal waters that are an integral part of the estuarine system — the definition expressly excludes wetland areas that are not part of an estuarine system. Where the Critical Area does reach, § 48-39-130(C) is absolute: no person shall "fill, remove, dredge, drain or erect any structure on or in any way alter any critical area" without a permit from the Department. So on the Waccamaw Neck, along the tidal Sampit, Black and Pee Dee, and anywhere the marsh line runs through a tract, the Critical Area is a live question and OCRM is a party to your project. On a pine-and-field tract at Andrews, Hemingway or Choppee it is usually not, and the water questions there are the county's wetland ordinance, federal wetlands jurisdiction and the flood map instead. The county's listing does still reach inland in one practical way: coastal zone consistency review runs in all eight coastal counties, and a rural build with a house pad, a shop pad, a long drive and a septic field passes an acre of land disturbance sooner than most people plan for.

S.C. Code § 48-39-10(B), (G) and (J) and § 48-39-130(C), Coastal Tidelands and Wetlands Act, served text read 8 September 2026 at https://www.scstatehouse.gov/code/t48c039.php ; SCDES Bureau of Coastal Management, https://des.sc.gov/programs/bureau-coastal-management ; SCDES South Carolina Critical Areas, https://des.sc.gov/programs/bureau-coastal-management/south-carolina-critical-areas ; SCDES Coastal Zone Consistency Certification, https://des.sc.gov/programs/bureau-coastal-management/coastal-zone-consistency-certification

48 percent of Georgetown County is wetland, and the county passed an ordinance about it in June 2026
Georgetown County Council adopted a Wetland Protection Ordinance on 23 June 2026, and its own findings section contains the number a land buyer most needs: "There are 249,336 acres of wetlands in Georgetown County, 48% of the land area, and over half of those are considered forested/shrub wetlands, followed by freshwater emergent wetlands (13%), and estuarine and marine wetlands (12%)." Forested wetland is exactly what a cheap wooded tract in this county looks like on a listing photograph. The ordinance sets buffers measured horizontally outward from the edge of the wetland and extending the full length of the delineation within the property: a general buffer of twenty-five feet on all wetlands and open waters; one hundred feet where a wetland is part of or adjacent to state or nationally protected conservation land; twenty-five feet riparian; fifty feet for industrial activity. Where more than one applies, the wider one controls. On top of the buffer sits a minimum fifteen-foot wetland setback measured outward from the edge of the buffer, and the ordinance says the greater of that setback and the zoning ordinance's own yard requirement applies. Two exemptions matter to an ordinary buyer. Wetlands of half an acre (21,780 square feet) or less, taken one wetland at a time, are exempt from the buffer requirement, and quarter-acre wetlands (10,890 square feet) are exempt from the fill restriction — but neither exemption extends to a wetland that crosses a property line or forms part of a larger system. And every developed lot, plus every undeveloped but recorded lot of record existing on 23 June 2026, is grandfathered as a legal non-conforming lot, with construction on those lots expressly exempted. The bite falls on new lots: no building permit for new construction or development on a newly created lot issues until a Wetland Application has been submitted and approved, and no certificate of occupancy issues until the site is inspected for wetland buffer compliance. If you are buying a tract that will be split off a parent parcel, the wetland delineation is now part of the deal, not part of the paperwork afterwards.

Georgetown County Wetland Protection Ordinance, adopted 23 June 2026, Articles III(a), VI, VII(a) and (b), VIII(c), (d) and (f), and XI(b)(xv), https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/4106/Wetland-Protection-Ordinance-PDF (application/pdf, 1,601,369 bytes, downloaded and read in full 8 September 2026); linked from Georgetown County, Land Development & Zoning Ordinances, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/180/Land-Development-Zoning-Ordinances ; the county's Wetland Buffer Application at https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/4147/Wetland-Buffer-Application-PDF

A detached shop here is capped at 12 feet if you want the five-foot setback — and it may hold no habitable area
This is the rule that reshapes a barndominium plan in Georgetown County, and it is short. Section 411 of the Zoning Ordinance provides that an accessory structure requiring a building permit "may be located in the rear setbacks no closer than five (5) feet from the property line" provided that no accessory structure in that portion of the setback "shall exceed twelve (12) feet in height" — height being measured, under Section 322, from finished grade at the building line to the midpoint of the roof between the eave and the ridge — and provided that "no accessory structure shall contain habitable area." Read those two conditions together and the consequence is concrete. A twelve-foot-tall building will not take a fourteen-foot overhead door, so a real shop cannot use the five-foot rear-setback relief at all; it has to sit inside the district's full yards, which in the Forest Agriculture/Residential district means fifty feet from the front line, twenty from the side and thirty from the rear. And because an accessory structure may hold no habitable area, the living half of a barndominium can never be in the accessory building. Section 419 adds that only one principal structure and its customary accessory structures may be erected on a lot. The maximum height of structures across the county's rural districts is thirty-five feet, and Section 806 tells you exactly where that thirty-five feet is measured from: in an X zone, to the midpoint between eaves and ridge, plus one foot of elevation allowed for grading; in an A or AE zone, thirty-five feet measured from the Base Flood Elevation as shown on the elevation certificate; in a V zone, the same measured from the BFE plus an additional three feet to accommodate the floor system as FEMA requires. The clean answer to all of it is the one that works everywhere: if the shop and the living space share one continuous roof, there is no accessory structure in the picture. The whole building is the dwelling, and the twelve-foot cap and the habitable-area prohibition have nothing to bite on.

Georgetown County Zoning Ordinance, Article IV General Provisions §§ 411, 413 and 419 (§ 411 as amended by Ord. 2009-27 and Ord. 2010-28), https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/273/General-Provisions-PDF ; Article VIII Exceptions and Modifications §§ 804 and 806 (§ 806 amended by Ord. 2012-18), https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/232/Exceptions-and-Modifications-PDF ; Article VII Area, Yard and Height Requirements, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/229/Area-Yard-and-Height-Requirements-PDF (all downloaded 8 September 2026 and read in both layout and reading-order extraction modes; the Forest Agriculture/Residential dimensional row is quoted from the reading-order render, where label and values print on one line, and is independently corroborated against the district section itself)

Georgetown County charges development impact fees, and the phase-in finished this July
Most South Carolina counties charge a building permit fee and nothing else. Georgetown County also charges impact fees, and it publishes the schedule as a single page. Residential fees are assessed per dwelling unit by square footage, in thirteen bands, each split into three components — Parks & Recreation, Law Enforcement and Transportation. A dwelling of 500 square feet or less is $424 plus $429 plus $325, totalling $1,178. At 1,501 to 2,000 square feet the components are $899, $910 and $909, totalling $2,718. At 2,501 to 3,000 they are $1,069, $1,083 and $1,119, totalling $3,271. At 3,501 to 4,000, $1,188, $1,203 and $1,264, totalling $3,655. The top band, 6,000 square feet or more, is $1,382 plus $1,399 plus $1,502, totalling $4,283 — and every one of those totals adds up exactly from its own three components, which is how you know the sheet is being read correctly. The schedule also carries its own phase-in note, and the phase-in is over: rates charged were 75 percent of the schedule from 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025, 85 percent from 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026, and "Effective 7/1/26: The full amount shown on the Impact Fee Schedule will be charged." The non-residential side is charged per 1,000 square feet, and warehousing is the cheapest line on the sheet at $247 per thousand against $3,898 for retail — a distinction worth understanding if any part of a building is going to be classified as something other than a dwelling. Separately, the county publishes guidelines under which a permit applicant whose household income is below eighty percent of the county median may claim exemption from the impact fees, with waivers available only on non-income-producing property and never on a dwelling that will be rented.

Georgetown County, Impact Fee Calculation Schedule, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/153/Impact-Fee-Calculation-Schedule-PDF (application/pdf, 583,474 bytes, downloaded 8 September 2026; a single scanned page carrying one 2,550 × 3,300 pixel image, which was extracted and read at native resolution, and every row total was checked against the sum of its three component columns); Georgetown County, Impact Fee Guidelines — Procedures Regarding Establishing Family Income, revised date of adoption 3 March 2010, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/205/Impact-Fee-Guidelines-PDF ; both linked from Georgetown County Building Department, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/176/Building-Department and Zoning, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/179/Zoning

Every new house here needs an engineer's seal, and the county says so on its own checklist
Georgetown County's New One & Two Family Dwelling Application Checklist is a one-page document, and one line on it settles a question that costs people weeks elsewhere. Under Construction Plans it states: "NOTE: Plans must have an Engineers Seal. PDFs required prior to issuance of the permit." That is not a threshold or a condition — it sits on the residential checklist, next to the list of structural plans the county wants, which is Floor/Roof Framing, Wall Section, Wall Bracing, Foundation Plan and, in its own line, "Wind Load & Seismic." A supplier's stock drawing is a starting point for that engineer, not a substitute for one, and South Carolina defines whose seal counts: modification IRC 2021-01 wrote into the residential code's definitions that design varying from the prescriptive methods "shall be made with accepted design standards by a South Carolina licensed Architect or Engineer as permitted by existing state law." Note the state named in that sentence. The rest of the checklist is worth reading before you buy rather than after: two complete 24 by 36 inch scaled sets, a site plan, a tree plan indicating trees to be removed and to remain, water and sewer approval or a state septic permit, an owner-builder disclosure statement filed with the Register of Deeds if you are acting as your own contractor, and a driveway encroachment permit from SCDOT or Public Works. If the parcel is in a flood zone, add an elevation certificate completed no more than one year before the application date, a three-party memo or V-zone certification worksheet for AE and VE zones, a recorded non-conversion agreement, and a maximum mean roof height of thirty-five feet measured from the base flood elevation. On the commercial side the county adds that where the square footage exceeds 5,000 an architect is required.

Georgetown County Building Department, "New One & Two Family Dwelling Application Checklist" (Building Permit Checklist), https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/147/Building-Permit-Checklist-PDF (application/pdf, 98,544 bytes, downloaded 8 September 2026 and read as extracted text); Building Permit Application, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/146/Building-Permit-Application-PDF ; Georgetown County Building Department, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/176/Building-Department ; the "accepted engineering practice" definition from SC Building Codes Council, 2021 Modification Index, modification IRC 2021-01, https://llr.sc.gov/bcc/PDFfiles/2021-Modification-index.pdf

Also worth knowing before you build in Georgetown County

The zoning ordinance applies where the maps say it applies — check your tax map number first
Georgetown County's Zoning Ordinance carries its jurisdiction in its own enacting clause, in capitals, and the wording is narrower than most people assume. The ordinance is stated to be "EFFECTIVE IN THOSE UNINCORPORATED PORTIONS OF GEORGETOWN COUNTY AS DESIGNATED ON THE OFFICIAL ZONING MAPS, EXCEPT FOR CERTAIN RESTRICTIONS LISTED IN SECTIONS 620.107 AND 804 DEALING WITH PRIVATE AIRFIELDS, WHICH APPLY TO ALL THE UNINCORPORATED PORTIONS OF THE COUNTY." Two carve-outs about private airfields reach the whole unincorporated county; the districts themselves reach the mapped part. Where the map is has changed how it is kept: since Ord. 2022-41, Section 501.1 provides that zoning districts are shown on a GIS coverage layer entitled "Zoning" maintained under the Planning Director, and "The depiction of zoning boundaries as shown on GIS shall constitute the Official Zoning Map for the County's zoning of unincorporated areas," with council-approved changes entered within fifteen business days. Section 500 establishes thirty-four base districts. Four carry rural land and they are not interchangeable. Forest Agriculture/Residential (FA/R) is the workhorse: one acre minimum, 100 feet of lot width, 50-foot front, 20-foot side and 30-foot rear yards, 35 feet maximum height, with single-family dwellings permitted and "one accessory dwelling per parcel when the single family dwelling is not a mobile home and the habitable space of the accessory dwelling unit does not exceed nine hundred (900) square feet." Five Acre Residential (R-5 Ac) takes the same envelope on five acres and exists, in the ordinance's own words, for areas where "due to its remoteness, the impermeability of soil or other soil characteristics and the absence of the necessary urban services, development of higher density is undesirable or infeasible." Rural General Residential (RG) is 15,000 square feet for a single-family dwelling with 70 feet of width and 25/10/20 yards. Preservation Agriculture (PA) has its own acreage rule at Section 626.106. Do not assume a district from a listing: ask the Zoning Department what your tax map number carries before you make an offer.

Georgetown County Zoning Ordinance, Article I Authority and Enactment Clause, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/271/Authority-and-Enactment-Clause-PDF ; Article V §§ 500, 501 and 501.1 (§ 501.1 amended by Ord. 2022-41), https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/272/Establishment-of-Zoning-Districts-and-Rules-for-the-Interpretation-of-District-Boundaries-PDF ; § 625 Forest Agriculture/Residential District, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/241/625-Forest-Agriculture-Residential-District-FAR-PDF ; § 624 Five Acre Residential District, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/240/624-Five-Acre-Residential-District-R-5-Ac-PDF ; § 621 Rural General Residential District, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/237/621-Rural-General-Residential-District-RG-PDF ; Article VII Area, Yard and Height Requirements, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/229/Area-Yard-and-Height-Requirements-PDF (all read 8 September 2026)

The tree ordinance splits the county in two — and it can move your pad but not shrink your building
Article XIII of the Zoning Ordinance divides Georgetown County into two tree overlay zones, and the line it draws is the same line that divides the county commercially. The Rural Area Tree Overlay Zone is defined as "all of Georgetown County not located on the Waccamaw Neck which is between the Horry County boundary, the Waccamaw River and the ocean" — so everything west and north of the Waccamaw, which is where the acreage is, sits in the rural overlay. Seven species are protected there: live oak, laurel oak, red maple, bald cypress, pond cypress, southern magnolia and yellow poplar, at a diameter-at-breast-height threshold the ordinance's table gives as twelve inches for each species it lists on its own line. Two provisions decide how much this costs you. First, Section 1302.1: occupied single-family parcels — meaning a parcel that already holds a habitable structure with a permanent certificate of occupancy — are exempt from both the tree protection and the tree replacement provisions of the whole article. Vacant land is not, which is exactly the land a barndominium buyer is looking at. On an unoccupied single-family parcel no protected tree may be removed unless the Planning Director makes one of a listed set of determinations. Second, and this is the one to remember, Section 1302.2.6: "In cases where a Protected Tree is in the footprint of a planned building pad, the County cannot require the planned habitable building to be decreased in size but can require the building pad to be shifted. This same provision shall also apply to farming structures." So a long shop bay is not something the tree ordinance can make you shorten — but it may well be something it makes you move, which on a tract with a narrow buildable window between a wetland buffer and a septic field is a real constraint. The county requires a tree plan as part of the residential building permit submittal, and Section 1301.8 prohibits mass grading of an individual building site until it is approved as part of a plan.

Georgetown County Zoning Ordinance, Article XIII Tree Regulations (Amended Ord. 23-24), §§ 1300.17, 1301.6, 1301.8, 1302, 1302.1 and 1302.2, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/1346/ARTICLE-13-Tree-Regulations-PDF (application/pdf, 163,952 bytes, downloaded 8 September 2026 and read in both layout and reading-order extraction modes; the species table's diameter column was checked in both renders and the entry shared by the two oak species renders ambiguously between them, so confirm the oak threshold with the Planning Department); the tree plan requirement on the county's own Building Permit Checklist, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/147/Building-Permit-Checklist-PDF

The farm base is shrinking here, and the size distribution tells you why
Georgetown County has the smallest agricultural base of any Pee Dee or Grand Strand county and one of the smaller ones in the state: the 2022 Census of Agriculture counts 213 farms working 63,303 acres at an average of 297 acres, which is 12.2 percent of the county's 520,746 land acres. The five-year direction is the story. Between 2017 and 2022 the number of farms rose 28 percent, land in farms fell 21 percent, and the average size fell 39 percent. More operations on much less ground, each of them far smaller — that is farmland being split and taken out of production, not consolidated. Inside the remaining base the land use is 12,666 acres of cropland, 1,745 of pasture, 41,496 of woodland and 7,396 of other uses, four figures that sum exactly to the 63,303-acre total. Woodland is 66 percent of it, the highest share of any land use here by a wide margin, so most of what is advertised as farm in this county is timbered ground and the clearing belongs in the budget before the slab does — subject to the tree ordinance above. The size distribution is genuinely favourable to someone who wants a workable tract rather than a farm: 42 operations of 1 to 9 acres, 60 of 10 to 49 and 43 of 50 to 179, so 145 of the county's 213 farms sit under 180 acres. Crops are 97 percent of the value sold against 3 percent for livestock and poultry, and the largest single line is nursery, greenhouse, floriculture and sod at $8.736 million, eleventh in the state — which is a Waccamaw Neck landscape-supply economy rather than a row-crop one. Meanwhile the county is growing: 65,912 residents estimated for 2025 against 63,404 at the 2020 census, up 4.0 percent. Rising population against a shrinking farm base is the arithmetic that makes land here scarce rather than cheap, and it is why the western half of the county is the part worth looking at.

USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2022 Census of Agriculture County Profile — Georgetown County, South Carolina, https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Online_Resources/County_Profiles/South_Carolina/cp45043.pdf (application/pdf, 879,950 bytes, downloaded 8 September 2026 and read in both reading-order and layout extraction modes; the three percentage-change figures are quoted from the reading-order render, where label, value and percent print on one line, and the layout render was confirmed to be shifted against its labels on exactly those three rows; the four land-use figures and the six farm-size counts were each checked to sum exactly to their totals); land area and the statewide farmland comparison from research/statewide/geography-and-population.md, built on the same census joined to the 2025 Census Gazetteer county file, https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/maps-data/data/gazetteer/2025_Gazetteer/2025_gaz_counties_45.txt ; population from U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 county population estimates, https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/datasets/2020-2025/counties/totals/co-est2025-alldata.csv

The published permit fee, band by band, and the penalty for starting early
Georgetown County's building permit fees come from Ordinance No. 2007-26, the Building Code Fee Schedule, as amended, and the residential schedule runs on total valuation in five steps. Up to and including $1,000 the fee is $30.00. From $1,001 up to and including $50,000 it is $30.00 for the first $1,000 plus $6.50 for each additional thousand or fraction thereof. From $50,001 up to and including $100,000 it is $348.50 for the first $50,000 plus $5.50 for each additional thousand. From $100,001 up to and including $500,000 it is $623.50 for the first $100,000 plus $4.50 for each additional thousand. From $500,001 and up it is $2,423.50 for the first $500,000 plus $3.50 for each additional thousand. Those five bands chain together exactly — $30 plus 49 times $6.50 is $348.50, which is the next band's base; $348.50 plus 50 times $5.50 is $623.50; $623.50 plus 400 times $4.50 is $2,423.50 — so the schedule reconciles against itself, which is the check worth doing on any fee sheet before you budget from it. The moving of any building or structure is $100.00. The ordinance also carries a provision people discover the hard way: if any person "commences any work on a building or structure, starts any development or places any mobile home before obtaining the necessary permit from the Building Official, he shall be subject to the penalty of a double permit fee," and no permit issues under the Flood Ordinance or the Zoning Ordinance until the prescribed fee has been paid. Impact fees are separate and are set out above. Septic is separate again and is a state permit rather than a county one.

Georgetown County, Permit Fee Schedule — Ordinance No. 2007-26, Building Code Fee Schedule, as amended, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/137/Permit-Fee-Schedule-PDF (application/pdf, 945,526 bytes, downloaded 8 September 2026; the document is a scan carrying 44 embedded image strips, which were extracted and read at native resolution, and the five valuation bands were reconciled arithmetically against one another before being quoted); linked from Georgetown County Building Department, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/176/Building-Department

Tidal ground, flatwoods ground, and where the septic evaluation says no
The soil survey measures 44,090 acres of Bohicket and 24,610 acres of Levy in Georgetown County. Both are tidal marsh soils — Bohicket is a Typic Sulfaquent formed in marine sediments in tidal marshes flooded twice daily by sea water, Levy a Typic Hydraquent whose type location is in Georgetown County itself, in the Pee Dee River flood plains. Neither is buildable ground in any ordinary sense: no bearing, subsidence when drained, and acid-sulfate conditions that attack concrete and steel. The useful part is that a buyer can read the flag off the taxonomy without any training — a map unit whose taxonomic class contains Sulfaquents, Hydraquents or Sulfihemists is a stop sign, and it is visible in the USDA Web Soil Survey before anyone drives out. Away from the marsh the county is Outer Coastal Plain flatwoods, with 16,674 acres of the Leon spodosol mapped here and a seasonal water table that sits roughly six to eighteen inches below grade from November through April. On that ground the height of the building pad is the foundation decision, not an afterthought: fill volume, compaction and drainage away from the pad are where the money goes, and an embedded-post foundation that spends half the year in saturated soil may simply be the wrong system for the site. Septic is permitted by the South Carolina Department of Environmental Services under Regulation 61-56, not by the county, and it is usually the septic evaluation rather than any county rule that decides how small a workable tract can be. Below the Fall Line the evaluation is done with hand borings rather than backhoe pits; § 200.6 keeps no part of the system within five feet of a building or a property line, 75 feet of a private well, 100 feet of a public well or 25 feet of a drainage ditch; and § 200.7(1) requires a usable repair area equal to at least half the original system, on soil proven suitable. On a wide barndominium footprint that arithmetic, not a setback line, is what fixes where the pad goes. Get the soil evaluation done before you close, and walk the tract in a wet month if you can.

S.C. Regulation 61-56, Onsite Wastewater Systems, §§ 200.5, 200.6 and 200.7(1), https://des.sc.gov/sites/des/files/Library/Regulations/R.61-56.pdf ; SCDES Professional Soil Classifiers, https://des.sc.gov/permits-regulations/septic-tanks/professional-soil-classifiers ; the Bohicket, Levy and Leon component acreages for Georgetown County and the Outer Coastal Plain water-table profile from research/statewide/soils-and-geology.md, built on USDA-NRCS Soil Data Access component acreage by survey area, with the series taxonomy read from the official series descriptions at https://soilseries.sc.egov.usda.gov/OSD_Docs/B/BOHICKET.html and https://soilseries.sc.egov.usda.gov/OSD_Docs/L/LEVY.html

Eighteen inches above grade, before the flood map says anything at all
Georgetown County has a finished-floor rule that applies everywhere in the zoned unincorporated county, flood zone or no flood zone. Section 413 of the Zoning Ordinance: "All buildings shall be elevated to help eliminate flooding, in that the finished floor shall be elevated at least eighteen inches above the grade of the lot or the grade of the street, whichever is less, or when this is not practical because of unusual conditions, the Building Inspector shall determine the appropriate elevation." On a slab-on-grade steel or post-frame building that is not a detail, it is a fill quantity, and on flatwoods soil the fill is already the largest earthwork number on the job. Section 406 then sends anything in a flood-prone area to the county's Flood Damage Prevention Ordinance, most recently revised February 2023 and amended 26 April 2023, which is administered by the Building, Planning and Zoning department. In a special flood hazard area the building permit picks up the elevation certificate — completed no more than one year before application — the three-party memo or V-zone certification worksheet for AE and VE zones, and a recorded non-conversion agreement for the enclosure below the lowest floor. The county publishes flood zone information and elevation certificates through an online mapping portal and links its own flood zone map viewer from the Building Department page. Read the flood map and the wetland delineation together before you make an offer: on a Georgetown tract they usually describe the same low ground from two directions, and the cheapest acreage in the county is very often exactly that ground.

Georgetown County Zoning Ordinance, Article IV General Provisions §§ 406 and 413, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/273/General-Provisions-PDF ; Georgetown County Flood Damage Prevention Ordinance (February 2023 revision), https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/2906 ; Georgetown County, Flood Protection, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/424/Flood-Protection ; the flood-zone submittal items from the county's Building Permit Checklist, https://www.gtcountysc.gov/DocumentCenter/View/147/Building-Permit-Checklist-PDF ; the county's flood zone map viewer, https://georgetown.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=8914e8af08b34826b2f38aac4dec476b

An excavator grading a compacted building pad on a cleared lot, with orange clay in the cut face, survey stakes and a drainage swale.
Below the slab

The expensive surprises are in the ground, not the building

What moves a South Carolina budget is usually below grade, and more often than not it is the drainfield rather than the foundation. R.61-56 § 200.1 settles whether a parcel can take an onsite system from soil morphology — texture, structure, depth to a restrictive horizon and depth to the zone of saturation — and § 200.2 then rules out two conditions outright: soils exhibiting massive or platy structure, and soils with substantial amounts of expansible layer clay minerals or smectites. That second clause is the one that bites on the mafic Piedmont, where the shrink-swell series sit in quantity under York, Fairfield, Chester, Laurens, Union, Newberry, Greenwood, McCormick, Lancaster, Saluda, Abbeville and Edgefield. A foundation problem has a price and an answer; an unbuildable septic parcel has neither, which is why we look at it first. Bedroom count is the number to settle early, because § 61-56.501 drives design flow from bedrooms, design flow drives trench length, and trench length plus a repair area decides how much good soil the parcel has to have — shop square footage adds nothing to it. Above the Fall Line the evaluation is done in backhoe pits rather than borings alone, so the answer comes from a dug hole and not a form. The site work, the foundation and the drainfield therefore get resolved together rather than one at a time. We price the dirt before we price the building.

What we build in Georgetown County

All nine services are available in Georgetown County. What a build costs depends far more on the parcel than on square footage, so we price against your land rather than publishing a rate card.

Custom Plans

Barndominium plans drawn for your parcel and sealed at the point where South Carolina’s engineering exemption stops applying.

Barndominium Kits

Engineered shell packages for South Carolina land — open construction under the state’s own definition, and therefore not a modular building.

Turnkey Builds

Barndominium construction from raw land through to occupancy: one contract, one schedule, one party answering the building official.

See all nine services

What a build looks like

Three stages every Georgetown County project passes through, from a raw parcel to a finished home. Site work first, because that is where the budget is decided.

Aerial view of an undeveloped rural lot with cleared rough grass, planted pine along one boundary, and a red dirt access track cut through orange clay.
Stage one

The parcel

Zoning, setbacks, flood zone and utility access get checked before anything is drawn.

An excavator grading a compacted building pad on a cleared lot, with orange clay in the cut face, survey stakes and a drainage swale.
Stage two

Pad and permit

Clearing, grading and a compacted pad, while the submittal works through whichever office issues the permit where you are building.

A finished barndominium at dusk with warm interior lighting glowing through its large windows.
Stage three

Frame to finish

Shell erected and dried in, then systems, insulation and interior finish through to CO.

Those are the rules where you are building in Georgetown County. Tell us what you want to build and we will draw it to them.

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Keep reading

The questions that usually come next once you know what Georgetown County allows.

Barndominium Cost Guide

Sourced per-square-foot ranges by tier and by size, with a calculator built on the same figures.

Read it

How Long Does It Take?

Census build-duration data, and what actually sets the permit clock where you are building.

Read it

Nearby areas we build in

Others we cover nearby. One may be a county and another a municipality inside one — and a South Carolina municipality can sit in two counties at once — so the office that issues the permit, the fees it charges, whether the land is zoned at all, and which design map covers it can all differ from one card to the next.

Horry County

Horry County
Charleston County

Charleston County
Berkeley County

Berkeley County
Williamsburg County

Williamsburg County

Building in Georgetown County: common questions

8 questions we get asked most often about building in Georgetown County. If yours is not on the list, ask it directly.

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What wind speed and seismic design category apply on my Georgetown County parcel?
Both come from a map the South Carolina Building Codes Council publishes for this county, and neither is a single county-wide number. Modifications IRC 2021-04 and IRC 2021-05 replaced the residential code's own wind and seismic sections with "the previously published maps by the South Carolina Building Codes Council," and those maps exist for thirty-five of the forty-six counties. Georgetown has one, and it is a notable sheet: it carries a wind contour labelled 150 MPH at both ends, and only one other county map in the state carries a 150 mph line at all — Charleston's. How to read it is printed on the map itself: a wind speed "applies at all points along the length of its corresponding (blue) line," and "Interpolation between wind speed lines is determined by the AHJ as permitted by Figure R301.2(4)(A) of the 2015 International Residential Code." The seismic side is lettered C, D0 and D1 on both sides of the category boundaries, so one Georgetown parcel can read C and another D1. That difference is not cosmetic. The residential code applies its seismic provisions to a detached dwelling only at D0 and above, which means a C parcel never picks up the seismic chapter while a D0 or D1 parcel picks up continuous solid or fully grouted footings under the exterior walls, reinforced footings and stem walls, plate washers on the anchor bolts, and the eight irregularity conditions that push most open-plan shop-plus-house layouts out of the prescriptive provisions entirely. Ask the Georgetown County building official for both readings, in writing, against your tax map number, before anyone orders steel or trusses. And do not let anyone tell you a 150 mph reading by itself puts the house outside prescriptive design: the code's 140 mph limb is qualified by the words "in a special wind region," and no South Carolina county is established as one.
Can the shop be bigger and taller than the house?
Bigger, generally yes. Taller and detached, that depends on where you put it — and one line of the zoning ordinance decides it. Section 411 lets an accessory structure sit as close as five feet to the rear property line, but only if it does not exceed twelve feet in height measured from finished grade to the midpoint of the roof, and only if it contains no habitable area. Twelve feet will not take a fourteen-foot overhead door, so a real shop cannot use that relief; it has to sit inside the district's full yards, which in Forest Agriculture/Residential means fifty feet from the front line, twenty from the side and thirty from the rear, under a thirty-five-foot maximum height. There is no square-footage cap sizing an accessory building against the dwelling, so the shop can be larger in floor area than the house. But because no accessory structure may contain habitable area, the living half of a barndominium can never be in the accessory building, and Section 419 allows only one principal structure per lot. The design that avoids every one of these problems is the obvious one: put the shop and the living space under one continuous roof. Then the whole thing is the dwelling, not an accessory structure, and the twelve-foot cap, the habitable-area prohibition and the one-principal-structure rule have nothing to attach to. Two more measurements to plan around. If any part of the tract is in an A, AE or V flood zone, Section 806 measures the thirty-five feet from the base flood elevation rather than from grade, with three extra feet allowed in a V zone for the floor system. And Section 413 requires the finished floor of every building in the county to sit at least eighteen inches above the grade of the lot or the street, whichever is less, whether or not there is a flood zone anywhere near you.
Georgetown is a coastal county. Does OCRM have to permit my build?
Usually not, and the reason is worth understanding because the two ideas get confused constantly. Georgetown is on the coastal-zone list, and that is settled by statute rather than by a map: S.C. Code § 48-39-10(B) names the eight counties in the coastal zone and Georgetown is one of them. But the Critical Area — the thing that actually triggers a permit — is defined separately at § 48-39-10(J) as four things and only four: coastal waters, tidelands, beaches, and the beach/dune system running from the mean high-water mark to the setback line under Section 48-39-280. Where that reaches, § 48-39-130(C) is absolute — no person may "fill, remove, dredge, drain or erect any structure on or in any way alter any critical area" without a permit from the Department. So on the Waccamaw Neck, on the tidal reaches of the Sampit, the Black and the Pee Dee, and anywhere the marsh line runs into a tract, OCRM is a party to your project and the critical line has to be located before anything is designed. On a pine-and-field tract at Andrews, Hemingway, Choppee or Plantersville, it generally is not, because there is no coastal water, tideland, beach or dune on the property. What does still reach inland is coastal zone consistency review, which runs in all eight coastal counties and attaches to the state construction stormwater permit — and a rural build with a house pad, a shop pad, a turnaround, a long drive and a septic field crosses an acre of land disturbance sooner than most people plan for. Two other water questions apply here regardless: the county's own Wetland Protection Ordinance, and federal wetlands jurisdiction where the tract holds jurisdictional wetlands. Do not buy a coastal permit you do not need, and do not skip the wetland delineation on the strength of not needing one.
The land looks cheap and wooded. What should I check before I make an offer?
In this county, three things, and all of them before the offer rather than after. First, wetlands. Georgetown County's own Wetland Protection Ordinance, adopted 23 June 2026, records in its findings that there are 249,336 acres of wetlands in the county — 48 percent of the land area — and that over half of them are forested or shrub wetlands. Forested wetland is precisely what a cheap wooded tract looks like in a listing photograph. The ordinance sets a twenty-five-foot general buffer on all wetlands and open waters, one hundred feet where the wetland adjoins protected conservation land, and a fifteen-foot setback outside the buffer on top of that, with the greater of that setback and the zoning yard controlling. Wetlands of half an acre or less taken individually are exempt from the buffer, and quarter-acre wetlands from the fill restriction, but neither exemption survives a wetland that crosses a property line or belongs to a larger system. Existing recorded lots of record are grandfathered; newly created lots are not, and no building permit issues on a new lot until a wetland application is approved. Second, the septic evaluation. It is a state permit under Regulation 61-56, not a county one, it is decided from soil morphology rather than a percolation test, and it requires a usable repair area of at least half the original system on soil proven suitable — so the tract has to carry the system, its full setback envelope and a proven reserve, none of it under the drive, the shop or the pad. Third, trees. In the rural overlay covering everything off the Waccamaw Neck, live oak, laurel oak, red maple, bald cypress, pond cypress, southern magnolia and yellow poplar are protected on vacant land, and removal needs a determination from the Planning Director. The county cannot make you shrink the planned habitable building to save a tree, but it can require the building pad to be shifted — and the same provision applies to farm structures. Make the offer contingent on the soil evaluation and the delineation, not on the closing.
What will Georgetown County charge me to build?
Two separate things, and the second one surprises people. The building permit fee comes from Ordinance No. 2007-26 and runs on total valuation: $30 up to $1,000; $30 for the first $1,000 plus $6.50 per additional thousand up to $50,000; $348.50 for the first $50,000 plus $5.50 per thousand up to $100,000; $623.50 for the first $100,000 plus $4.50 per thousand up to $500,000; and $2,423.50 for the first $500,000 plus $3.50 per thousand above that. Those bands chain together exactly, which is the arithmetic check worth doing on any published fee sheet. Moving a building is $100. And if work starts before the permit issues, the ordinance provides for a double permit fee. The second charge is the development impact fee, which most South Carolina counties do not levy at all. Georgetown assesses it per dwelling unit by square footage in thirteen bands, each split into Parks & Recreation, Law Enforcement and Transportation. A dwelling of 1,501 to 2,000 square feet totals $2,718; 2,501 to 3,000 totals $3,271; 3,501 to 4,000 totals $3,655; and 6,000 square feet or more tops out at $4,283. The schedule was being charged at a discount while it phased in — 75 percent through 30 June 2025, 85 percent through 30 June 2026 — and its own note says that effective 1 July 2026 the full amount shown is charged, so a build permitted now pays the full schedule. The county publishes guidelines under which an applicant whose household income is below eighty percent of the county median may claim an exemption, with waivers available only on non-income-producing property and never on a dwelling that will be rented. Septic is a separate state permit, and driveway access is a separate SCDOT or Public Works encroachment permit.
Do I really need an engineer, or can I build from the plan set the building supplier sends?
In Georgetown County you need the engineer, and the county puts it on its own residential checklist rather than leaving it to interpretation. The New One & Two Family Dwelling Application Checklist states, against Construction Plans: "NOTE: Plans must have an Engineers Seal. PDFs required prior to issuance of the permit." The same checklist lists what the structural plans must show — floor and roof framing, wall section, wall bracing, foundation plan, and wind load and seismic. So the county has already decided the question for every new house here, and on a barndominium there are three further reasons it would land in the same place anyway. Where the Council's map letters your parcel D0 or D1, the residential code's seismic provisions switch on for a detached dwelling and Section R301.2.2.6's eight irregularity conditions — a large diaphragm opening, a vertically offset floor, shear lines that do not run in two perpendicular directions — describe the barndominium form almost exactly, and an irregular building must be designed to accepted engineering practice. Where a foundation system has no prescriptive provision, as an embedded-post system does not, Section R403.1 puts it in the "other approved structural systems" category, which is outside the prescriptive method by definition. And in D0 through D2, Section R403.1.2 wants continuous solid or fully grouted masonry or concrete footings under the exterior walls, which a line of isolated pier pads does not provide without an engineered equivalent. South Carolina then narrows who may sign: modification IRC 2021-01 defines accepted engineering practice as design "made with accepted design standards by a South Carolina licensed Architect or Engineer as permitted by existing state law." An out-of-state seal is not what that definition asks for. Budget for the South Carolina engineer from the beginning; treat the manufacturer's drawings as that engineer's starting material.
Is my parcel actually zoned? And what district should I be looking for?
Ask, rather than assume — the ordinance's own enacting clause is narrower than people expect. Georgetown County's Zoning Ordinance is stated to be effective "in those unincorporated portions of Georgetown County as designated on the Official Zoning Maps," and only two provisions dealing with private airfields, Sections 620.107 and 804, are stated to apply to all the unincorporated portions of the county. Since Ord. 2022-41, the Official Zoning Map is the county's GIS "Zoning" coverage layer maintained by the Planning Director, with council-approved changes entered within fifteen business days. So the first call on any tract is to the Zoning Department with the tax map number. If the parcel is in a district, the ones that carry rural land are worth knowing apart. Forest Agriculture/Residential is the workhorse — one acre minimum, 100 feet of lot width, 50/20/30 yards, 35 feet of height, single-family dwellings permitted, plus one accessory dwelling per parcel whose habitable space does not exceed 900 square feet where the main dwelling is not a mobile home. Five Acre Residential takes the same envelope on five acres, and the ordinance is candid about why it exists: for areas where "due to its remoteness, the impermeability of soil or other soil characteristics and the absence of the necessary urban services, development of higher density is undesirable or infeasible." Rural General Residential is 15,000 square feet for a single-family dwelling with 70 feet of width and 25/10/20 yards. Preservation Agriculture carries its own acreage rule. Two general provisions catch people out regardless of district: every building needs fifty feet of frontage on a publicly dedicated or maintained street, or thirty feet on a cul-de-sac where the lot is fifty feet wide at the building line; and everything within reach of US Highway 17 has to hold a ninety-foot setback from that right-of-way, whether the county calls it a front, side or rear yard.
Where in Georgetown County should I actually be looking for land?
West and north of the Waccamaw River, and the county's own ordinances draw the line for you. Article XIII of the Zoning Ordinance defines the Rural Area Tree Overlay Zone as "all of Georgetown County not located on the Waccamaw Neck which is between the Horry County boundary, the Waccamaw River and the ocean" — so the county itself distinguishes the Neck, which is Murrells Inlet, Litchfield, Pawleys Island and DeBordieu, from everything else. On the Neck the land is priced as beachfront, the parcels are platted, the beachfront jurisdictional lines and the critical area are live on every waterfront tract, and there is no acreage answer at any price. The rest of the county is a different market: Andrews on the Williamsburg line, Hemingway toward Marion, Plantersville, Choppee, Sampit and the Black River and Pee Dee bottoms. That is where the 213 farms and 63,303 acres in this county sit, and where 145 of those 213 operations are under 180 acres. Be realistic about what is on offer. Land in farms fell 21 percent between 2017 and 2022 while the population rose 4.0 percent, so this is a scarce base rather than a cheap one, and 41,496 of the 63,303 farm acres — 66 percent — are woodland, which means clearing cost and the tree ordinance both belong in the budget. Two neighbouring counties are the honest answer for anyone whose budget will not carry Georgetown's numbers: Williamsburg, immediately west, holds 208,646 acres in farms with a flat five-year trend, and Horry, immediately north-east, holds the largest combination of in-migration and farmland in the state. If the reason you want Georgetown is the Grand Strand commute rather than the county line, look at all three before you commit.

Building in Georgetown County?

Start with the plan. Tell us what you want to build and we will draw it, then confirm which office issues the permit for your parcel, what it will let you put there, and what wind load it has to meet. That conversation costs nothing.

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