Question 1

Can I actually build a barndominium in the City of Myrtle Beach?

Accepted Answer

Honestly, no — and it is better to know why now than after you have paid for a lot. Three things in the city's own ordinance close it. First, the shop. The zoning ordinance does not merely set a setback for a detached accessory building; it caps its floor area inside the definition itself: "Accessory Use, Private Garage: An accessory building not exceeding 900 square feet in floor area designed or used for the storage of not more than four motor driven vehicles, owned and used by the occupants of the building to which it is accessory. Not more than one of the vehicles may be a commercial vehicle and that one of not more than one ton capacity." Nine hundred square feet is smaller than a 30-by-40 shop, which is 1,200. The vehicle clause is the second blade — one commercial vehicle, nothing over a ton, which excludes the dually, the equipment trailer and the second work truck that are usually the whole reason for wanting a shop. And Section 1502.B's list of uses customarily accessory to a single-family dwelling runs private garage, shed or tool room, playhouse, recreation facilities, storm shelter and greenhouse. A workshop, a barn and a contractor's shop appear nowhere on it. Second, the land. Section 1402 names every zoning district in the city and there is no agricultural district, no rural district and no large-lot estate district among them. The most generous single-family minimum lot area in the city is R-15's 15,000 square feet — 0.34 of an acre. Third, the envelope: 35 feet maximum height in every single-family district, 35 to 40 percent maximum building coverage, and lot widths of 60 to 80 feet. On a minimum R-15 lot, 35 percent coverage is 5,250 square feet of footprint for the house, the garage and everything else combined. What you can build here is a house. What you cannot build here is a house attached to a shop on land. The next question says where you can.

Question 2

So where should I be looking instead?

Accepted Answer

West, into Horry County, and not very far. The three towns to search around are Conway, Aynor and Loris, all twenty to forty minutes from the beach, all inside the same county, the same building code regime and the same labour market. The land is genuinely there: USDA's 2022 Census of Agriculture counts 629 farms in Horry County working 151,691 acres — 20.9 percent of a 725,217-acre county — with 92,254 acres of cropland, 48,253 of woodland and 5,579 of pasture, and an average farm of 241 acres. That is roughly ten times the entire land area of the City of Myrtle Beach. The parcel sizes are buyable too: 248 operations of 10 to 49 acres and 178 of 50 to 179 acres, so about two thirds of the county's farms are under 180 acres. Conway is the county seat, 30,627 people on the Waccamaw River, and at 27.995 square miles it is actually larger in land area than Myrtle Beach. Loris is 2,935 people up toward the North Carolina line. Aynor is 1,068 on US 501 toward Marion County. And the rules change when you cross the city line, which is the real point. Horry County's zoning ordinance puts the inland acreage in the Forest Agriculture district, where a single-family dwelling is a permitted use, and its Section 402 governing accessory buildings contains no size cap at all — no square-footage ceiling, no percentage of the dwelling — once a principal dwelling exists on the parcel. A shop that is defined out of existence at 900 square feet inside the city is simply not capped a few miles west of it.

Question 3

I'm relocating from out of state. What should I understand before I start looking?

Accepted Answer

That "Myrtle Beach" is doing two jobs in your head, and only one of them is a city. The Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 estimates put the City of Myrtle Beach at 40,937 residents. The Myrtle Beach-Conway-North Myrtle Beach metropolitan statistical area — which is simply the whole of Horry County — is 427,551, up 21.8 percent since the 2020 census. The city is under a tenth of the place its name is attached to. When you picture Myrtle Beach you are almost certainly picturing the Grand Strand and its hinterland, and the hinterland is where the ground is. Three practical consequences follow. Your permitting authority depends on which side of the city line your parcel is: inside it, the City of Myrtle Beach Construction Services Department at 921 North Oak Street; outside it, Horry County Code Enforcement in Conway, on a different fee schedule and a different submittal list. Your flood exposure changes dramatically over a short distance — the city requires three feet of freeboard above the base flood elevation and holds a Community Rating System Class 5 for exactly that kind of higher standard, while the same countywide FEMA study identifies no Special Flood Hazard Area at all in Aynor. And the design numbers are not what you would guess from the coastline; see the wind question below. One thing that does not change anywhere in the State: South Carolina requires the same Building Codes Council codes everywhere, so the code edition is not something to shop for. Zoning, flood rules and permit procedure are what actually vary, and they vary a great deal within twenty miles here.

Question 4

What design wind speed applies on the Grand Strand? I've read 150 mph.

Accepted Answer

That figure is very widely repeated and the Council's own map does not support it. Regulations 8-1202 and 8-1203 replace the residential code's wind and seismic provisions with the maps the South Carolina Building Codes Council publishes for 35 of the 46 counties, so the governing instrument here is the Council's Horry County sheet rather than a national map or an insurance table. That sheet is an image-only scan with an empty text layer, which is why it is so rarely quoted. Read at native resolution it carries two boxed blue contours. One is labelled 140 MPH and runs roughly north to south through the western part of the county, passing just east of Aynor near Cool Spring and Dog Bluff. The other is labelled 150 MPH — and it lies offshore, out in the Atlantic, parallel to the beach and several miles out. It does not cross land anywhere in Horry County. Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Surfside, Socastee, Conway and Loris therefore all sit between the two lines rather than on either. The map's own note sets out what that means: 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." Modification IRC 2021-04 adds that the local building official "may delineate the wind design category within their jurisdiction, as long as, it does not surpass those provided on the Applied Technology Council (ATC) website." So there is no number to look up. There is a determination made by your authority having jurisdiction for your address — and inside the city limits that is the City of Myrtle Beach, not Horry County. Get it in writing before a steel package or a truss order is placed.

Question 5

Does the city publish its design criteria, or do I have to work them out?

Accepted Answer

You supply them, and that is a genuine difference from a couple of other South Carolina jurisdictions. Some places publish a filled-in IRC Table R301.2, "Climatic and Geographic Design Criteria", telling designers exactly which wind, seismic, frost, termite and decay values apply — Charleston and York County are the two found doing it in this State. Myrtle Beach does not. Its full applications, documents and forms index carries a permit fee schedule, residential and commercial submittal packets, an inspection process sheet, driveway, fence and pool requirements, floodplain requirements, solar and EV charging requirements and a general South Carolina building codes reference, but no local design-criteria table. Instead the burden lands on the applicant: the city's Single-Family Dwellings and Additions submittal sheet requires the cover sheet of every plan set to carry a "Design criteria list" including a code compliance statement, occupancy category, component importance factor, type of construction, "Wind, seismic, live loads etc.", the design pressure rating of windows and doors, and windborne debris protection by plywood panels, impact-resistant glazing or storm shutters tested to ASTM E1996 and ASTM E1886. The city reviews your statement rather than publishing the values. Practically that means the wind determination has to be settled with Construction Services before the plans are drawn, not asserted on them afterwards. The rest of the submittal is by email rather than a portal — plans to the plan reviewer address, paperwork to the permit tech address — the sheet says to allow ten business days for review, incomplete submittals are not accepted, and oceanfront single-family construction must clear the Community Appearance Board first.

Question 6

Does the Charleston earthquake code apply here?

Accepted Answer

No, and this is one of the real advantages of the Grand Strand over the Lowcountry. The seismic labels hand-lettered on the Council's Horry County sheet are B and C, either side of a hand-drawn boundary, with the C on the south-western side toward Georgetown County — so Myrtle Beach, Conway and Aynor read B. SC Residential Code R301.2.2 applies the code's seismic provisions to a detached one- or two-family dwelling only in Seismic Design Categories D0, D1 and D2, which is item 2 of that section. At category B a detached house never picks the chapter up at all. Everything that makes this building type difficult in the Charleston triangle therefore does not fire here: R403.1.2's requirement that exterior walls sit on continuous solid or fully grouted masonry or concrete footings, R403.1.3's footing and stem-wall reinforcement, and above all R301.2.2.6's eight irregularity conditions, which a wide clear shop bay next to a two-storey living end trips several of by design. The Council's maps put Charleston County at C through D2, Berkeley at D1 and D2 and Dorchester at D0 through D2, so the same plan really is a different building an hour and a half down the coast. What that also means is that the argument for engineering here has to be made honestly on other grounds — on wind uplift and the continuous load path, on the water table and the pad, and on what the permitting jurisdiction demands at submittal. Horry County, for its part, will not accept a residential plan set without wind design summary sheets and an original South Carolina engineer's or architect's seal.

Question 7

How high will I have to build for flood, and does that change if I move inland?

Accepted Answer

Dramatically, and it is one of the clearest arguments for looking west. Inside the City of Myrtle Beach, floodplain management is not a separate ordinance — it is Article 11 of the zoning ordinance. Section 1110.A requires that "All residential structures, including prefabricated and manufactured homes, shall have the lowest floor of such structure, including basement, elevated no less than three feet above the base flood elevation", and Section 1110.B applies the same three feet to nonresidential structures. The city's own plain-language handout puts it directly: the city adds three feet to the base flood elevation so the first floor has to sit at BFE plus three. There are two Special Flood Hazard Area designations inside the city, AE and VE, and in a VE zone the bottom of the lowest horizontal structural member must be at least three feet above the BFE, basements are prohibited, fill is not allowed except limited beach-compatible landscaping fill, and enclosures below the first floor may use only open lattice, collapsible insect screening or breakaway walls rated between 10 and 20 pounds per square foot. The city tells residents plainly that if you live there your property is in or near the flood hazard area. Three feet of freeboard on a wide slab-on-grade building is a fill, retaining and driveway-grade problem long before it is a paperwork problem. Now the contrast. The governing map for all of this is the countywide Horry County Flood Insurance Study, FIS number 45051CV001B, revised 16 December 2021 — and on its own community listing that study flags the Town of Aynor with an asterisk defined as "NO SPECIAL FLOOD HAZARD AREAS IDENTIFIED", stating in the body that "The Town of Aynor has no identified Special Flood Hazard Areas (SFHA)." Thirty miles inland, the same study that forces three feet onto a Myrtle Beach foundation maps no regulatory floodplain at all. Conway and Loris sit between the two, with riverine floodplain along the Waccamaw and its tributaries but nothing like the coastal high-hazard VE zone. In this county, distance from the ocean is measurable directly in foundation cost.

Question 8

If I do find an oceanfront or second-row lot, what do the state beachfront lines do?

Accepted Answer

They sit on top of the city's zoning, and they are drawn by the State rather than by Myrtle Beach. Horry County is one of eight counties named in the definition clause of the Coastal Tidelands and Wetlands Act — S.C. Code § 48-39-10(B) lists "Beaufort, Berkeley, Charleston, Colleton, Dorchester, Horry, Jasper, and Georgetown" — and that is a closed statutory list, not an inference from a coastline. Because the city fronts the Atlantic, the beach/dune system limb of the critical-area definition at § 48-39-10(J) is live here, measured "from the mean high-water mark to the setback line as determined in Section 48-39-280." Section 48-39-280 sets the geometry: "The baseline for each standard erosion zone is established at the location of the crest of the primary oceanfront sand dune in that zone", and "A setback line must be established landward of the baseline a distance which is forty times the average annual erosion rate or not less than twenty feet from the baseline for each erosion zone based upon the best historical and scientific data adopted by the department." Section 48-39-290(A) then bars new construction or reconstruction seaward of the baseline apart from a narrow list of walkways, decks, fishing piers, landscaping, pools and groins on stated conditions, and between the baseline and the setback line § 48-39-290(B)(1)(a)(i) permits a new habitable structure only where it "is no larger than five thousand square feet of heated space" and is placed as far landward as practicable. Both lines are re-established on a statutory review cycle, so the current lines have to be checked against the specific parcel. Section 48-39-330 also requires a contract of sale for property seaward of the setback line to carry a disclosure naming the lines and the local erosion rate. None of this is a barndominium problem in practice, because the oceanfront blocks are the least likely place in the county to find land — but it is a further layer of state permitting over exactly the part of the city the search term evokes.

Question 9

Can I put it up as a farm building and finish it out later?

Accepted Answer

No, and South Carolina closes that in the definition rather than in a test — so it does not become available by driving inland either. S.C. Code § 6-9-65(A) defines a farm structure as one constructed on a farm "other than a residence or a structure attached to it, for use on the farm including, but not limited to, barns, sheds, and poultry houses." A barndominium is a residence, so it sits outside the exemption from the first day, and the shop half of a shouse under one continuous roof sits outside it too because it is attached to a residence. There is no square-footage test and no percentage-of-use test to work with. The section then closes the three gaps people try. It is not automatic: § 6-9-65(C) requires the owner to file an affidavit with the local building official before construction, stating the purpose and intended use. It evaporates on conversion, because the definition expressly excludes a structure "originally qualifying as a 'farm structure' but later converted to another use" — which is precisely the plan of putting up a pole barn now and finishing it into living space afterwards. And § 6-9-65(B) preserves FEMA National Flood Insurance Program standards regardless, so the exemption never reaches flood, which matters across most of this city. Horry County's own zoning ordinance draws the same line from the land-use side without pretending it is a code exemption: its Section 108 lets genuinely agricultural buildings used in connection with a bona fide agricultural use be shown on a site plan without being drawn to scale, while still meeting the district's exterior setbacks. That is a drafting concession about site plans. It is not permission to live in the building.

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