Question 1

Does anyone actually publish design numbers for this county, or will my engineer have to guess?

Accepted Answer

They are published, and that is unusual. The county maintains its own completed Table R301.2(1), dated 28 March 2024, and it fills in every cell: ground snow load 10 PSF, wind speed 115 mph, topographic effects No, special wind region No, wind-borne debris zone No, seismic design category B, weathering Moderate, frost line depth 12 in., termite Heavy, winter design temperature 20, ice barrier underlayment required No, air freezing index 76, mean annual temperature 61.2, and "See detailed floodplain info" for flood hazard. The residential code prints that table blank and tells each jurisdiction to complete it, which most never do — so for a great many places on either side of the state line the honest answer is that no authority has published a figure. Here you can hand the sheet to the building designer and the plan reviewer and both are reading the same document. The one cell that stays site-specific is exposure category: the county's own footnote D says wind exposure "shall be determined on a site-specific basis in accordance with Section R301.2.1.4."

Question 2

Can the shop be bigger than the house?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and there is no ratio rule to work around. Chapter 155 § 155.622(B) limits a residential accessory structure to two storeys in height or the zoning district maximum, whichever is lower, and requires it to fit inside the impervious-surface allowance in Table 155.059-1 — 50 percent on an agricultural or single-family detached lot. There is no floor-area cap and nothing tying the accessory building to a percentage of the dwelling. In AGC, AGC-I, RUD and RUD-I the district height maximum is 50 ft. Setbacks come from Table 155.622-1: the district front setback, 10 ft to an internal side line (5 ft on lots of 8,500 sq ft or less, or 65 ft or less in width), and 5 ft to the rear. Two practical notes. First, if the shop and the living space share one continuous roof, none of the accessory rules apply at all — the whole thing is simply a single-family detached dwelling, permitted by right in all nine residential-capable districts. Second, a detached shop over 200 square feet is its own permit application, with its own plans, plat, Accessory Building Letter of Acknowledgement and Garage Storage Workshop Detail Sheet, and § 155.621(C) will not release a certificate of occupancy for it before the house has one.

Question 3

Can I put it up as a farm building and skip the code?

Accepted Answer

No, and the statute closes the door in the definition rather than leaving room to argue. S.C. Code § 6-9-65(A) defines a farm structure as one built on a farm "other than a residence or a structure attached to it." A barndominium is a residence, so it falls outside the exemption in every case, and the shop half of a shouse falls outside it too because that half is attached to the residence. There is no square-footage test and no percentage-of-use test to work with. The definition also excludes anything "originally qualifying as a 'farm structure' but later converted to another use", so building a bare pole barn under the exemption and finishing it into living space afterwards puts the full code back on it as the dwelling it has become. Even for a genuinely detached, genuinely agricultural barn the relief is conditional: § 6-9-65(C) requires the owner to file an affidavit with the building official before construction stating the intended use, and § 6-9-65(D) leaves the county free to require a building permit anyway. FEMA flood standards apply regardless.

Question 4

The land out toward Sharon and Hickory Grove is heavy red clay. Is that a problem?

Accepted Answer

It can be, and the expensive version of the problem is the septic system rather than the slab. Soil Data Access returns 48,170 acres of Wynott and 22,078 acres of Brewback as major components in this survey area, plus Winnsboro, Helena, Iredell and Armenia — the largest concentration of high shrink-swell ground anywhere in the state. Brewback is a series that exists nowhere else: its type location is about 11.3 miles south-southeast of the town of York, it was established here in 2009, and its official description rates shrink-swell potential "Very high", drainage somewhat poorly drained, saturated hydraulic conductivity low, with very firm, very sticky, very plastic slickensided clay from roughly 6 to 28 inches below grade and moderately weathered diabase under it. That depth band is exactly where a slab and a footing sit. The foundation side of that is an engineering problem with a price attached. The wastewater side may not be: R.61-56 § 200.2 rules that soils "exhibiting massive or platy structure, and soils which have been identified as having substantial amounts of expansible layer clay minerals or smectites, are unsuitable for onsite wastewater systems." Whether that sentence bites on a particular map unit is a determination for a licensed professional soil classifier on the parcel, not something anyone can read off a map. The bad ground here is patchy and unmarked, so check the soil survey first and get the evaluation done before you close, not after.

Question 5

What is this going to cost me in county fees?

Accepted Answer

Two separate things, and the second one is the surprise. The building permit itself is priced off construction value on the published fee schedule: $17 for the first $1,000 plus $7 for each additional $1,000 up to $50,000, then $360 plus $6 per $1,000 to $100,000, then $660 plus $5 per $1,000 to $500,000. Footnote 1 says that value "is determined by the adopted International Code Council (ICC) Building Valuations Data, square foot construction costs on July 1 of each year" — a square-footage calculation against a national table, not your contract. Residential plan review is No Fee and the initial inspection is No Fee; residential re-inspections are $50 each. Land disturbance permit and plan review runs $350 per disturbed acre or fraction of one, and a floodplain study review is $350. The second thing is the school impact fee, and it is not small: $29,640 on a new single-family dwelling inside the Fort Mill School District, $8,000 inside the Clover School District, and nothing at all across the rest of the county. It is collected when the residential permit issues. Two otherwise identical parcels a few miles apart can differ by nearly thirty thousand dollars on that line alone, so check the district boundary before you make an offer.

Question 6

Who do I file with, and does that change if my land is inside a town?

Accepted Answer

The Building and Codes division of Planning & Development Services, at 18 W. Liberty Street in York, issues permits and inspects in the unincorporated areas of the county plus the Town of Hickory Grove and the Town of Sharon. The other municipalities run their own building departments, so if the parcel is inside one of those town limits you file there — though the school impact fee still goes to the county's Planning & Development Services office before a permit can issue. The county's own guidance is to check the GIS layer first to see which jurisdiction the property sits in, and that is the same layer that answers the zoning question: § 155.017(B) makes the Zoning GIS layer the Official Zoning Map and "the final authority as to the current zoning status of land." The code being enforced is the same either way — the 2021 residential code with state modifications applies statewide and no local government may write its own. What genuinely varies between offices is the permit procedure, because the code's administrative chapter is not part of the statewide adoption. Onsite wastewater is a separate track with SCDES, and the septic approval has to be in hand for the residential permit packet.

Question 7

How much does a category B seismic rating actually change the build?

Accepted Answer

It takes an entire chapter of the code off the table. Residential code section R301.2.2 applies the seismic provisions to detached one- and two-family dwellings only in seismic design categories D0, D1 and D2, and to townhouses from category C. The published category here is B, two steps below the trigger, so a detached barndominium never picks up those provisions: no requirement for continuous solid or fully grouted footings under exterior walls by seismic operation, no enhanced sill anchorage with plate washers and tightened bolt spacing, and no run at the eight irregularity conditions in R301.2.2.6 that push a design out of the prescriptive path. That last point matters more than it sounds for this building type — a wide open shop bay beside a two-storey living end tends to trip the diaphragm-opening and shear-line-offset conditions, and in the parts of the state that carry a D rating that alone forces an engineered design. The wind side is equally friendly here, and it is worth reading off the chart rather than from a threshold: 115 mph, topographic effects "No", special wind region "No", wind-borne debris zone "No". Exposure is the exception the chart itself flags — its footnote D leaves it to a site-specific determination under Section R301.2.1.4, which is where a set drawn to a sheltered exposure and dropped onto open pasture goes wrong. None of that removes the engineer from a post-frame or steel building — a foundation system the code has no prescriptive table for is still a design that varies from the prescriptive method, and the state's own definition of "accepted engineering practice" then requires it be made by a South Carolina licensed architect or engineer.

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