Richland County Septic Permits: Lake Murray and the Eastover Trap

Sourced from the Richland County Code of Ordinances (Sec. 24-66, Ordinance 1024-83, adopted March 15, 1983), the Dominion Energy South Carolina Lake Murray Permitting Guidelines (revision effective 2020), Richland County Utilities and East Richland County Public Service District publications, the SCDES office directory, and R.61-56 — last checked August 2026.

Who Issues Richland County Septic Permits

This surprises people moving to South Carolina from almost anywhere else: Richland 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 Richland County: State Park Health Center, 8500 Farrow Road Building 12, Columbia, SC 29203 — (803) 896-0620. This office also covers Fairfield, Lexington and Newberry.

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.

Lake Murray: Dominion Forbids Septic, It Does Not Permit It

Lake Murray borders four counties — Richland, Lexington, Newberry and Saluda. It is not a public lake in the sense most people assume. It is a reservoir owned by Dominion Energy South Carolina and operated as the Saluda Hydro Project under a FERC license, with shoreline management traceable to a plan from 1975.

People arrive expecting a second permit. That is not what happens, and the difference matters.

The Lake Murray Permitting Guidelines (revision effective 2020) set the boundary at the 360-foot contour on plant datum — normal maximum pool elevation. Below that line, and inside Dominion’s vegetative buffer zones, § IX.4(e) prohibits outright: “No septic tanks and/or drain fields.”

So Dominion does not permit septic on Lake Murray. It forbids it inside its boundary. The effect is a hard geographic exclusion rather than an extra application:

• You apply to SCDES through central intake, and you pay $150. That is the septic permit.
• The entire system must fit on private upland above the 360-foot contour and outside the vegetative buffer — tank, drainfield, and the reserve area of at least 50 percent of the original system required by R.61-56 § 200.7 — while still meeting the 75-foot mean-high-water setback and the 75 and 100-foot well setbacks.
• A Dominion permit is needed for shoreline structures: docks, boat ramps, marine railways, boat lifts, erosion control and brushing. Residential structures are handled by Dominion; commercial structures additionally require SCDES, the Army Corps and FERC.

One thing we will not tell you, because we could not verify it: some sources describe a Dominion shoreline lease that has to be in place before a septic system can be approved. We found no documented lease requirement tied to septic, and we could not read any revision of the guidelines later than 2020. Whether SCDES approval must precede a Dominion application, or the other way round, is unverified. Ask Dominion directly.

The County Code Is Quieter Than You Would Expect

For a county of Richland’s size, there is remarkably little local septic law that we could read.

The one clearly readable provision is Sec. 24-66, “Building sewers and connections” (Ordinance 1024-83, adopted March 15, 1983). It requires a permit before connecting to the public sewer, allows one building sewer per structure, and prohibits roof-drain connections. It does not address septic systems, and it sets no mandatory connection distance.

We found no Richland County mandatory sewer-connection distance, no county septic lot-size rule and no watershed or wellhead overlay district. But we also could not read Sec. 26-222, so please read that as not found rather than does not exist. If a Richland County septic restriction lives anywhere, that is the likeliest section.

The Eastover Trap

This one is worth a heading of its own, because it caught us and it will catch you.

Search for a mandatory sewer-connection rule near Columbia and you may land on Eastover Sanitary District Ordinance 2013-02, which contains exactly the clean 300-foot connection rule you were hoping to find. It is Eastover, North Carolina. The giveaway is that it cites the North Carolina General Statutes. There is also an Eastover in Richland County, South Carolina, which is precisely what makes the confusion dangerous rather than merely annoying.

Richland County has more same-name traps than any other county in this guide:

• There are Richland Counties in Ohio, Wisconsin and Montana, and their septic pages routinely outrank South Carolina’s on generic searches.
• A widely circulated headline about a $95.2 million wastewater treatment plant for “Columbia” is Columbia, Tennessee.

Before you act on any septic rule you found online for this county, check that the citation is to South Carolina law. A South Carolina ordinance will cite the S.C. Code or R.61-56, never the N.C.G.S.

Growth Pressure at Blythewood

Richland County is absorbing a large industrial investment: Scout Motors is building an electric vehicle plant at Blythewood, a roughly $2 billion project, and it is driving wastewater capacity work across the northern part of the county. The City of Columbia has given initial approval to a wastewater capacity expansion connected to that growth.

We are not going to give you the dollar figure. The headline is corroborated across multiple outlets, but every article body we tried returned an access error, so we never read the number in a source we could stand behind. Two circulating figures for Richland-area sewer projects are unverified in our records, and a page that reprints them is reprinting a headline, not a fact.

What matters for a septic decision is the direction of travel rather than the figure. Where sewer capacity is being built out, R.61-56 § 300 becomes live: once a treatment facility is accessible for connection, a new septic permit is barred — and so is a permit to repair or replace a failing one. If you are buying land in the Blythewood corridor, ask about planned sewer, not just present sewer.

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. Richland County straddles the fall line at Columbia, with the Congaree River bottomlands along its southeastern edge. The practical consequence is that a soil evaluation in one part of this county tells you very little about another — and a six-inch standard leaves very little margin when the water table moves.

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 Lake Murray lot the reserve area is usually the thing that decides the question, because it has to fit above the 360-foot contour and outside Dominion’s buffer along with everything else.

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 found no Richland County septic lot-size rule — but Sec. 26-222 is one of the sections we could not read, so treat that as unverified 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.

Richland County Utilities is at 7525 Broad River Road, Irmo, SC 29063 — 803-401-0050, open Monday to Friday 8:00 to 4:30, closed noon to 1:00 — and reports that new connections take about ten working days once permits are in hand. Parts of the county are served instead by East Richland County Public Service District, which has notified customers in Forest Acres of a possible 5 percent sewer increase from July 2026. Because no Richland County connection distance appears in anything we could read, the accessibility question here is one to put to the utility that actually serves your address, in writing.

What We Could Not Confirm

Where Richland County Sits

Richland is the Midlands county containing Columbia and the state capital, running from Lake Murray in the southwest, across the fall line, to the Congaree bottomlands and the rural southeast around Eastover and Hopkins. It is the county where the septic answer is least likely to come from the county itself — the binding constraints are the state regulation, Dominion’s shoreline boundary, and whichever utility has a main near you.

Nearby counties we cover: Lexington County · Kershaw County · Newberry County · Sumter 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.