Short-Term Rentals in Pickens County, South Carolina

What counts as a short-term rental, and what registering requires

Pickens County defines a short-term rental broadly: any rooms, campground spaces, lodgings, or sleeping accommodations furnished to transients through a hotel, inn, tourist court, tourist camp, motel, campground, residence, or any other place offering rooms or sleeping accommodations for consideration. That's a wide net, deliberately written to cover everything from a single spare-bedroom Airbnb to a full cabin rental near Table Rock State Park or Lake Keowee, and the county requires all of them to become compliant with local law rather than carving out exceptions for smaller or occasional-use properties.

The mechanics run through the county's own Parks, Recreation & Tourism department, which administers the short-term-rental registration process. Anyone planning to operate a short-term rental in Pickens County -- whether an existing cabin near the park, a new build intended for vacation-rental use, or a Lake Keowee-adjacent property -- should register directly with the county before listing, rather than assuming informal, word-of-mouth operation is low-risk.

The local accommodations fee and active compliance monitoring

Once registered, a short-term-rental operator is required to collect a local accommodations fee from each guest, under the specific authority of Pickens County Code of Ordinances, Chapter 10, Article IV, Section 10 (part of the county's businesses chapter). That fee gets remitted to the county by the 20th day of the month following collection -- or the next business day if the 20th falls on a weekend or holiday -- with a 5% penalty assessed on any amount not paid by that deadline. This is a genuinely specific, cited fee mechanism, not a vague 'local taxes may apply' disclaimer, and it should be built into the operating economics of any short-term-rental plan here from the start.

What sets Pickens County apart from many of its rural South Carolina neighbors is active enforcement: County Council approved a partnership with Host Compliance, a nationally recognized firm that specializes in identifying and monitoring short-term rentals across a jurisdiction (typically by scanning listing platforms and cross-referencing addresses against local registries). As of the county's own reporting, that partnership had already helped identify more than 400 short-term rentals throughout Pickens County -- a substantial number for a county this size, and a clear signal that unregistered listings are genuinely being found, not merely theoretically at risk. If you're evaluating an existing unregistered rental as part of a purchase, treat the registration and back-fee exposure as a real diligence item, not a hypothetical one.

Watch for pending state-level changes

As of this research pass, at least two short-term-rental-related bills (H.442 and H.3861) were pending before the South Carolina Legislature in the 2025-2026 session. Neither had been confirmed enacted as of this page's review. State legislation on short-term rentals can reshape the balance of authority between local governments and the state -- in some states, new legislation has preempted local STR ordinances entirely; in others, it has simply set floor requirements local governments must meet. Because Pickens County's own program is relatively detailed and locally administered, any new state law in this area is worth checking against the county's current ordinance before assuming today's registration and fee structure will remain unchanged.