Florence County Septic Permits: The Office That Is Not the Office

Sourced from Florence County Environmental Services, the Florence County Economic Development Partnership utilities listing, the 1997 statewide 208 water quality plan, Post and Courier reporting of March 31, 2026, and R.61-56 — last checked August 2026.

Who Issues Florence County Septic Permits

This surprises people moving to South Carolina from almost anywhere else: Florence County does not issue septic permits, and neither does any other South Carolina county. Onsite wastewater permitting is a state function.

The agency is the South Carolina Department of Environmental Services (SCDES), created on July 1, 2024 when Act 60 of 2023 split the old DHEC into SCDES for environmental programs and SC DPH for public health.

Where the application goes: ATTN: OSWW, SCDES, 2600 Bull Street, Columbia, SC 29201
Statewide phone: 1-855-731-2504
Online: epermitting.des.sc.gov · Form: D-1740, rev. 07/2026

The Fee Is $150 in Every County

Because permitting is centralized, there is one fee statewide. R.61-56 § 102.2: the Department “shall charge a fee of one hundred and fifty dollars ($150.00) to evaluate the site of a proposed onsite wastewater system,” amended effective May 27, 2022. There is a $150 re-application fee if the instructions are not followed.

You may instead hire a Professional Soil Classifier privately, capped at “no more than three (3) times SCDES’s fee” — so up to $450. People use it to skip the queue, and the queue is real: a 700-permit backlog in April 2023, and coastal counties running six to fourteen weeks behind.

Two Offices, Similar Names, Completely Different Jobs

We flag this because it is a predictable failure. “Environmental” is the word most people reach for when thinking about septic systems, and in Florence County that word belongs to a different department entirely. The old DHEC name did not help either — it contained “Environmental Control,” which is precisely the sort of near-match that sends people to the wrong switchboard.

The $537 Million Program, and What Prompted the Latest Phase

Florence is spending heavily on water and sewer, and the numbers are worth knowing if you are weighing whether sewer might reach you.

A $537 million program — $446 million in bonds plus about $91 million in cash and grants — is taking surface water treatment from 10 to 20 MGD by December 2026 and wastewater treatment from 22 to 33 MGD, while closing the Timmonsville wastewater plant. Ratepayers are carrying it: +5 percent in year one (to roughly $72.50 a month), +10 percent in year two, and +9.5 percent in years three to five.

Then, in March 2026, a sanitary sewer overflow put E. coli and fecal matter into Jeffries Creek, with contamination reported at Jeffries Creek, Malden Drive, Mars Hill and Hoffmeyer Road. The response is a $50 million pipe-widening project taking mains from 18 inches to 30 inches, with a first phase possibly complete by 2028. The city has requested $300 million federal and $30 million state support on top of $7.25 million already awarded. The system it is fixing runs 700 miles of water line and 500 miles of sewer, serving a city whose population grew 7.5 percent over five years.

The Timmonsville Precedent

One more piece of local history worth knowing, because it shows what happens when a small system fails: the Town of Timmonsville lost its utility. The City of Florence took over its water and sewer, funded by a $500,000 state grant and a $700,000 state revolving fund loan for drinking water in 2016 — a new 300,000-gallon elevated tank serving 2,000-plus residential customers — then three loans totalling $8.5 million for wastewater in 2018. The EPA gave the project PISCES and AQUARIUS recognition.

The Rule That Costs the Most Money: Six Inches

South Carolina requires a minimum vertical separation of six inches between the deepest point of effluent application and the zone of saturation — the level groundwater reaches — for systems under 1,500 gallons per day (R.61-56 § 200.3).

• South Carolina — 6 inches
• North Carolina — 18 inches on the coast, 12 inches inland
• Georgia — 24 inches
• Alabama — 24 inches

South Carolina permits systems on ground its neighbors would refuse. Florence is flat Pee Dee ground where the water table sits close to the surface in wet months.

The Repair Area Nobody Tells You About

Under R.61-56 § 200.7, a new system must reserve “a usable repair or replacement area equivalent to at least fifty (50) percent of the size of the original system” — 100 percent for community systems.

Read that as a land requirement, because that is what it is. Your lot has to hold the tank, the drainfield, and half a drainfield again in reserve, while meeting every setback. On a tight lot the reserve area is what fails, not the drainfield. On the larger rural parcels outside the city this is usually workable; inside the older neighborhoods it is worth confirming early.

Setbacks and Sizing

• 75 feet from a private well · 100 feet from a public well
• 75 feet from the mean high water line of a stream, canal or retention pond, and from a delineated critical area line
• 25 feet from a drainage ditch · 25 feet upslope of a basement
• 5 feet from a property line · 5 feet from a building
• Rock or a restrictive horizon must sit more than 12 inches below the deepest point of effluent application

There is no state minimum lot size for a septic lot. R.61-56 requires only that the lot be large enough to hold the system, the reserve area and the setbacks. The county’s Minimum Standards for Site and Building Plans (Rev. 120222-JWA, dated December 2, 2022) requires plans to “Show points of connection to septic tanks, public sanitary/storm sewer systems, water supply lines and other applicable utilities” — a drawing requirement, not a dimensional one. It contains no minimum lot size, no sewer-connection trigger and no water-table provision. County Code chapters on public utilities, land development and zoning were not retrievable, so a rule may exist in them that we have not seen.

When Sewer Blocks a Septic Permit

R.61-56 § 300 is blunt: “Permits for new onsite wastewater systems shall not be issued where a wastewater treatment facility is accessible for connection,” and the same bar applies to repairing or replacing a failing system.

But the state sets no distance. “Accessible” is defined only negatively — “where annexation or easements to cross adjacent property are required to connect… the wastewater treatment facility shall not be considered accessible.” So if connecting would require you to be annexed, or to cross a neighbor’s land, sewer is not accessible and your septic permit stands. Every mandatory-connection distance in South Carolina is local.

Florence County has seven public water and wastewater entities: the City of Florence, Johnsonville, Lake City, Coward, Olanta, Pamplico and Scranton. The City of Florence holds a wastewater permit for 22 MGD against an average daily flow of 11 MGD, leaving about 5.65 MGD of excess capacity. Note one cross-county wrinkle: the Darlington County Water & Sewer Authority also serves portions of Florence County, so your provider may not be the one your address implies. Under the 1997 statewide plan, Florence County itself is the designated management agency for unincorporated areas.

What We Could Not Confirm

Where Florence County Sits

Florence sits where I-95 meets I-20, the commercial center of the Pee Dee, with a substantial sewered city and seven separate utilities across a large rural county. It is spending half a billion dollars on water and sewer while still relying on onsite systems across most of its land area.

Nearby counties we cover: Darlington County · Marion County · Clarendon County. All of them run through the same state permit and the same $150 fee — what differs is the local ordinance layer, compared on our South Carolina septic permits by county page.