Georgetown County Septic Permits: Stormwater, Not Septic

Sourced from Georgetown County Water and Sewer District materials (the district was created by Act 733 of June 22, 1967), the Waccamaw Region Section 208 Water Quality Management Plan (adopted October 10, 2011), the South Carolina Environmental Law Project notice of intent filed March 6, 2024, a 2023 state bacteria study of Murrells Inlet and the Pawleys and Litchfield area, the SCDES onsite wastewater program, and R.61-56 — last checked August 2026.

Who Issues Georgetown County Septic Permits

This surprises people moving to South Carolina from almost anywhere else: Georgetown 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
Field office serving Georgetown County: we could verify only five SCDES environmental affairs offices — Columbia, Aiken, Lancaster, Orangeburg and Sumter — and none of them covers Georgetown. For this county the verifiable answer is central intake in Columbia. We have not published a local address we could not confirm.

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.

Read the Phrase “Water And/Or Sewer” Carefully

Georgetown County Water and Sewer District (GCWSD) was created on June 22, 1967 by Act 733 as a special purpose district. It has no taxing authority, which means it funds itself from rates and fees rather than property taxes.

Its own description of coverage is the sentence that matters: it provides “water and/or sewer service to most of the more than 517 square miles” of Georgetown County.

That is not a claim of countywide sewer, and it should not be read as one. Water systems are cheap to extend relative to sewer, so in practically every rural county in South Carolina the water footprint is far larger than the sewer footprint. GCWSD does not publish a breakdown of which is which, and we could not derive one. A page that turns “water and/or sewer to most of the county” into “most of the county has sewer” has invented a fact.

Here is why the distinction is not academic. R.61-56 § 300 bars SCDES from issuing a new septic permit where a wastewater treatment facility is accessible for connection — and the same bar applies to repairing or replacing a failing system. The state sets no distance for that test; “accessible” is defined only negatively, and every mandatory-connection distance in South Carolina is local. We found no Georgetown County connection distance.

So the determination on your parcel is being made case by case, on facts nobody has written down publicly. The one action worth taking before you buy, build or plan a repair is to ask GCWSD in writing whether sewer is accessible to your specific address — not whether the district serves your area, which will almost always be yes, but whether it serves it with sewer. Keep the answer.

Murrells Inlet: A Stormwater Story, Not a Septic Story

Search for septic problems in Georgetown County and you will find a legal dispute over water quality in Murrells Inlet. It would be easy, and wrong, to write it up as a septic contamination case.

What actually happened: the South Carolina Environmental Law Project, acting for Preserve Murrells Inlet, filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue Georgetown County on March 6, 2024. The subject was the county’s NPDES municipal stormwater permit — the permit governing runoff from streets, roofs and parking lots.

And on the bacteria itself, the state has published a finding that runs the other way. A 2023 study of Murrells Inlet and the Pawleys and Litchfield area concluded that the fecal coliform found there was “likely not a result of municipal and community waste treatment facilities” — pointing instead at stormwater.

We are including this because the temptation to reach for it as evidence about septic is obvious, and several aggregator sites do exactly that. The available evidence does not support blaming septic systems for the bacteria in Murrells Inlet. If you own a system in this county, that is a fact in your favor, and you should know it.

The Document Most Likely to Name Your Community

If you want to know whether your part of Georgetown County is on an official list for sewer extension, there is one document worth requesting by name.

The Waccamaw Region Section 208 Water Quality Management Plan, adopted October 10, 2011, covers Georgetown, Horry and Williamsburg counties. Two parts of it matter:

• Chapter 5, “Future Septic System Management Needs” — page 65
• Table 5-2, the state’s priority list of environmentally distressed communities for sewer needs — page 68

Table 5-2 is the most likely place in any public document to find named communities with recognized septic problems in this region. We were not able to extract its contents, so we cannot reproduce the list — but we can tell you exactly where it is, which is more than a guess dressed up as an answer.

One caution about that plan. It notes that “the Marysville community in particular has several residences that have experienced malfunctioning septic systems.” The excerpt we read does not say which of the three counties Marysville is in, and we are not going to assign it to Georgetown to make the page more interesting. If the name matters to you, ask for the plan.

Bear in mind the plan was adopted in 2011. Treat it as a record of what was recognized then, not a description of today.

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. Georgetown County is where the Waccamaw, Pee Dee, Black and Sampit rivers converge into Winyah Bay. There is very little high ground in the eastern half of this county, and six inches of dry soil is a thin standard to be building on when the water table is tidal.

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 a Georgetown County lot near tidal water, the reserve area and the 75-foot mean-high-water and critical-area setbacks are competing for the same ground — and the reserve area is the part buyers forget to check.

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. We did not locate a Georgetown County land development ordinance containing a septic lot-size minimum — but we also did not read one, so treat that as unchecked rather than settled.

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.

Georgetown County Water and Sewer District keeps two offices: 4145 Highmarket Street, Georgetown, SC 29440 — (843) 546-8408, and 456 Clearwater Drive, Pawleys Island, SC 29585 — (843) 237-9727, both open Monday to Friday 8:00 to 5:00. Because GCWSD does not delineate its water footprint from its sewer footprint, and because no Georgetown County connection distance appears in anything we could read, a written accessibility answer for your specific address is the only reliable version of this fact. Get it before you commission a soil evaluation, not after.

What We Could Not Confirm

Where Georgetown County Sits

Georgetown County runs from Murrells Inlet and the Waccamaw Neck down through Winyah Bay to the Santee delta, with the city of Georgetown at its center. It is the county in this guide where the decisive fact is hardest to obtain and easiest to fake — whether sewer is accessible to your parcel — and where the widely repeated story about septic contamination turns out, on the state’s own evidence, to be a story about stormwater.

Nearby counties we cover: Horry County · Williamsburg County · Charleston 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.