Buying Land in Horry County, South Carolina (Inland & Agricultural Focus)

Scope note: this page is about inland land, not the resort coast

Horry County is widely known for Myrtle Beach and the Grand Strand resort market, but that beachfront and near-beach real-estate market -- pricing, tourism-driven demand, short-term-rental economics -- is a distinct subject with its own dynamics, and is covered by our sibling site, usbeachlife.com, rather than here. This page instead covers the land-use and regulatory mechanics that apply to Horry County parcels generally: zoning (including the county's agricultural districts), the Coastal Zone Management Act's critical-area permitting layer, and septic. Most of Horry County's 1,133 square miles of land area -- it's the largest county in South Carolina by that measure -- lies well away from the coastal strip, in agricultural and forested land along the county's western and northern river systems, and that inland land is this page's actual focus.

Zoning: a real countywide ordinance, with dedicated farm and forest districts

Horry County maintains its own zoning ordinance for unincorporated county land (last updated per a January 7, 2026 posted version), administered by the county's Planning and Zoning Department. The ordinance includes two agricultural-oriented districts -- Limited Forest/Agriculture and Forest and Agriculture -- intended for farming, forestry, and low-density residential, commercial, social, and cultural uses, plus a detailed agritourism framework that classes working farms by size (from under-3-acre "home operations" up through 80-plus-acre operations) and matches permitted agritourism activities, including events up to 499 attendees, to farm class under a registered agritourism permit. Commercial swine operations are prohibited outright in the ordinance, and certain districts bar general commercial farming activity -- both worth checking against a specific parcel's district before planning a farm-based use.

Zoning for any specific parcel is looked up by tax map number through the county's Planning and Zoning Department -- confirm the district and its permitted-use table directly rather than assuming from a neighboring parcel or a general sense of the area, since Horry County's zoning map is detailed and varies block by block in places.

The CZMA critical-area mechanic: real, but geographically bounded

Horry County is one of the eight counties named in the South Carolina Coastal Zone Management Act (S.C. Code Title 48, Chapter 39), which hands SCDES's Bureau of Coastal Management (formerly DHEC OCRM) direct permitting authority over construction and alteration within mapped critical areas -- coastal waters, tidelands, beaches, and the beach/dune system. That authority is real and applies independent of county zoning, but only inside those mapped boundaries, not across the whole county. A parcel well inland of the coast -- which describes most of Horry County's land area given how large the county is -- is very unlikely to fall inside a mapped critical area at all, but the only way to know for certain is to check the specific parcel against SCDES's critical-area mapping rather than assume either way from a Horry County address alone.

Septic for a Horry County parcel follows the statewide SC pattern: Regulation 61-56 is a state technical standard, and the permit is issued by SCDES -- specifically its Myrtle Beach-based Environmental Affairs office, which also covers Georgetown and Williamsburg counties -- not by a county health department. Confirm site suitability with that office, and the applicable zoning district and any critical-area status separately with the county and SCDES's coastal program, before treating a specific tract as buildable.

Flooding is a separate, real risk from the CZMA coastal overlay

Beyond the CZMA critical-area mechanic above, Horry County carries a distinct and well-documented river-flood risk driven by the Pee Dee and Waccamaw River system, unrelated to coastal storm surge. The Waccamaw River set an all-time flood record during Hurricane Florence in 2018, and the county has since adopted its own Flood Resilience Master Plan while the Army Corps of Engineers runs an active flood-risk feasibility study for the Waccamaw specifically. See our dedicated Flood Zones in Horry County page for the full river-flood mechanism and what it means for a specific parcel -- this is a separate check from both the CZMA overlay above and a standard FEMA flood-map lookup.