Sourced from the Kershaw County Unified Code of Zoning and Land Development Regulations (as amended May 22, 2012), the county Lake Wateree Overlay District forms, R.61-56, and the SCDES office directory — last checked August 2026.
Who Issues Kershaw County Septic Permits
This is the part that surprises people moving to South Carolina from almost anywhere else: Kershaw 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. Septic sits in SCDES’s Bureau of Regional and Laboratory Services.
Where the application goes: ATTN: OSWW, SCDES, 2600 Bull Street, Columbia, SC 29201
Statewide phone: 1-855-731-2504 (Onsite Wastewater Customer Service Center)
Online: epermitting.des.sc.gov
Form: D-1740, revision 07/2026
Field office serving Kershaw County: 2475 Environmental Way, Lancaster, SC 29720 — (803) 285-7461. Note that Kershaw is administered from Lancaster, not from Camden.
The Fee Is the Same in Every County: $150
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.” That section was amended effective May 27, 2022. Payment is by check or money order to SCDES, and there is a $150 re-application fee if the application instructions are not followed.
There is a second route worth knowing about. You may hire a Professional Soil Classifier to do the evaluation privately, and the rules cap what they may charge at “no more than three (3) times SCDES’s fee” — so up to $450 (form DES 25-0011, dated 07/2025). People use it to skip the queue, and the queue is real: SCDES reported a 700-permit backlog in April 2023, and coastal counties have run six to fourteen weeks behind.
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Lake Wateree: The Strictest Local Septic Rules in South Carolina
First, a correction we see made constantly: Kershaw County borders Lake Wateree, not Lake Murray. Advice written for Lake Murray does not apply here, and the rules are entirely different in kind — Lake Murray’s constraint comes from a utility that forbids septic inside its boundary, while Kershaw’s comes from the county’s own zoning code.
Septic is prohibited inside water quality buffers
From the Kershaw County Unified Code of Zoning and Land Development Regulations, § 5:3.6-2(B): “The installation of septic systems or any portion thereof is prohibited within water quality buffers.”
Note the words “or any portion thereof.” Not the tank, not most of the drainfield — no part of it. Repairs to an existing tank are allowed, subject to buffer protection during construction. Combined with the state’s requirement that you also reserve a replacement area of at least 50 percent of the original system, a buffered lakeside lot can run out of usable ground quickly.
Access manholes over every compartment
This is a hardware requirement the state does not impose. From the county’s residential pre-application: any new or replacement onsite system installed within the Lake Wateree Overlay District must include “an access manhole built into the lid over each compartment of the tank, and over the outlet end of the septic tank.”
It is a small cost at installation and an expensive retrofit later, so it is worth telling your installer before the tank is ordered rather than after it is buried.
An inspection before sale — and South Carolina has no such rule
There are consequences attached, with clocks. A “failed system” is defined as one not adequately treating and disposing of sewage, or causing a nuisance or health threat. On a failure, the county Building Official must notify the state within five days, and the owner must make contact within fifteen days.
If you are selling a Lake Wateree property in Kershaw County, budget for a pump-out and an inspection, and start early — a failure discovered two weeks before closing puts you inside those clocks with a repair to arrange and a state permit to obtain.
Conservation design pushes away from septic entirely
Separately, § 5:3.3-4 requires conservation design to use “public sewer or community on-site sewage treatment and disposal systems and public water.” So the county’s preferred development pattern is not individual septic at all.
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).
Six inches is remarkably little, and the comparison is the fastest way to understand it:
- 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. That is legal, and it is also why it is worth taking the soil evaluation seriously even on a lot that looks dry in August.
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 still meeting every setback. On a tight lot that reserve area is what fails, not the drainfield itself. On a Lake Wateree lot this is the constraint that bites, because the water quality buffer removes part of the lot from consideration entirely — see below.
Setbacks and Sizing in Kershaw County
These come from R.61-56 and apply identically statewide:
- 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 (tidal waters and tidelands)
- 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. Kershaw’s local rules operate through buffers and overlays rather than a flat acreage minimum. We were not able to retrieve Article 3 of the county code, which contains the Lake Wateree Overlay District dimensions — buffer widths, minimum lot size and impervious limits. Those numbers exist and we do not have them. Ask county Planning and Zoning directly.
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.
Kershaw County Utilities runs the West Wateree system serving unincorporated areas including Lugoff, alongside the Lugoff-Elgin Water Authority, the Town of Elgin, the City of Camden and Palmetto Utilities. The most detailed figures we could find for West Wateree date to 2009 — 1,362 customers and a new plant with Phase I capacity of 2 MGD replacing a lagoon limited to 720,000 gpd, at a Phase I cost of $5.7 million funded partly by a 1.3-mill tax increase on unincorporated residents. Seventeen years on, treat all of that as history rather than current capacity. More recently, the Kershaw County and Lee County Regional Water Authority and the Lugoff-Elgin Water Authority each received $1,500,000 in state Rural Infrastructure Authority funding in November 2025, and the City of Camden received $861,898 in May 2025.
What We Could Not Confirm
Article 3 of the county code — the Lake Wateree Overlay District dimensions. This is the biggest gap on this page and we would rather say so than guess. The buffer widths, the minimum lot size inside the overlay, and the impervious surface limits are all in Article 3, and we could not retrieve it. Everything above is verified; the numbers that would tell you how much of your lot is buffered are not. Call county Planning and Zoning and ask for the LWOD provisions of Article 3 specifically.
SCDES office hours. Not published for the Lancaster office or any other. The address and phone above are verified from SCDES’s own office directory; the hours are not.
A sewer ordinance rewrite. A local news headline indicates SCDES prompted Kershaw County to update its sewer ordinance, but we could not read the article and cannot give you its date or contents. If a county sewer ordinance has changed recently, that headline is where to start.
Where Kershaw County Sits
Camden anchors a county on the growth path north-east of Columbia, with Lake Wateree along its northern edge and unincorporated land in between that is largely on onsite systems. What makes Kershaw distinctive is not the state permit — that is identical everywhere — but the fact that a lakeside property here carries a buffer prohibition, a hardware requirement and a pre-sale inspection duty that exist nowhere else in South Carolina.
Nearby counties we cover: Newberry County · Clarendon County. All of them run through the same state permit and the same $150 fee — what differs is the local ordinance layer, which is compared on our South Carolina septic permits by county page.
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