South Carolina Court Filing Fees by County

How South Carolina court filing fees are actually set

South Carolina's shape is closer to Florida's than to Georgia's: the ejectment (eviction) filing cost is set by statute, not by county discretion, and every county whose current schedule we could read in full — Lexington, Chester and Beaufort — charges the same $50.00 total: a $20.00 ejectment filing fee, a $10.00 fee for whoever serves the papers, a $10.00 assessment under S.C. Code § 22-3-340, and a further $10.00 to issue the writ of ejectment once the case is won. Some counties' printed schedules show $55.00 instead, because § 8-21-1010(14) and § 27-37-30(C)(2) add a further $5.00 mailing/verification charge specifically when the tenant is served by posting and mail rather than in person — that is a difference tied to how one particular tenant is served, not a difference between counties. We also confirmed the $80.00 total for a general magistrate civil "Summons and Complaint" (the filing a landlord would use to sue for rent owed) in two separate counties, Lexington and Beaufort, at the identical figure despite being broken into differently labeled line items on each county's own schedule, which is further evidence the total is fixed by the state rather than set locally. We checked the $7,500 jurisdictional ceiling directly on eight counties' own pages — Richland, Lexington, Beaufort, Chester, Dorchester, Kershaw, Pickens, Oconee and Colleton — and it was identical everywhere. What we could not do is confirm the $50.00 ejectment total on a working page for any of South Carolina's four largest counties by population — Richland, Charleston, Greenville and Horry all publish a magistrate court page, but none of the ones we could reach included an eviction fee figure, and Charleston County's site actively blocked our requests. We are publishing $50.00 as the statewide figure on the strength of the smaller and mid-sized counties we could verify, but we could not certify it in the state's biggest county.

The statutory caps

This is a single schedule set by state law and applied by every magistrate court we could verify, not a locally-set county schedule the way Georgia's is. Lexington County labels its own copy "ATTACHMENT K: MANDATORY SCHEDULE OF CIVIL FEES FOR MAGISTRATES COURT," and the South Carolina Judicial Branch's own news page lists a "Fee Memorandum - Magistrate Courts and Municipal Courts" dated July 5, 2024, which is almost certainly the source document county courts are copying from. We could not open that memorandum itself — the Judicial Branch's site blocks automated access to everything except its home page — so our $50.00 figure rests on county-posted copies of the state's schedule rather than the state's own document.

Source: S.C. Code Ann. § 8-21-1010(6), (9), (14); § 22-3-340; § 27-37-10 et seq., Schedule of fees and costs to be collected by magistrates; assessment on magistrate court filings; Ejectment of Tenants. S.C. Code Ann. § 8-21-1010, as amended, sets the base per-case-type filing fee ($20.00 for landlord/tenant proceedings, $45.00 for a general civil summons and complaint, $5.00 for any paper not otherwise listed); § 22-3-340 layers a separate flat assessment ($10.00 on most filings, $25.00 on a summons and complaint or interpleader) on top of the base fee.. No single county page states the arithmetic in one place; we reconstructed the $50.00 ejectment total ($20.00 filing + $10.00 service + $10.00 § 22-3-340 assessment + $10.00 writ of ejectment) from Lexington County's official "Attachment K: Mandatory Schedule of Civil Fees for Magistrates Court" and Lexington's own plain-language eviction guide, and confirmed the same $50.00 total independently on Chester County's magistrate court page, which itemizes it as a $40.00 initial filing plus a $10.00 writ fee. An older, undated-effective 2004 fee notice still posted on Dorchester County's site shows the identical $40.00-plus-$10.00 structure, suggesting this arithmetic has been stable for at least two decades even though the underlying dollar amounts in § 8-21-1010 read low on their own. Checked July 31, 2026.

Every eviction in South Carolina is filed in the Magistrate Court of the county where the rental property sits, but a county is not one courtroom with one judge the way it can feel in a small Georgia county — Richland County alone has 14 magistrates, Greenville has 21, and even a small county like Chester has 5. What we found no evidence of is Ohio's problem, where the unit that hears a case is a municipal or district court whose boundaries do not match the county line. In every South Carolina county we checked, the magistrates serving that county all work from the same state-set fee schedule, so the county remains the right unit to publish this site by.

The single most important thing to know about South Carolina's fee is that the number printed in the fee statute itself, $20.00 for a landlord/tenant filing, is not the whole story. Add the $10.00 § 22-3-340 assessment, the $10.00 service fee, and the $10.00 fee to issue the writ of ejectment once you have won, and the real total is $50.00 in every county whose current schedule we could read start to finish. That is a smaller gap than Georgia's, where a $22.00 statutory cap turns into $50-$157 on the ground, but it is the same kind of trap: reading only the base statute would leave you $30.00 short.

Who actually serves the papers is not uniform. Lexington and Beaufort counties both use the county Sheriff's civil process division. Chester County uses a constable instead — the same pattern Georgia has with its handful of Marshal and Constable counties, just on a smaller scale here. The dollar amount charged for service appears to be the same $10.00 either way in every county we could confirm it, so it is who shows up at the door that changes, not what it costs.

South Carolina does hold jury trials in eviction cases, which is a real difference from Georgia's magistrate court, which never empanels one. S.C. Code § 27-37-80 lets either the landlord or the tenant demand a jury, and magistrate court juries statewide are six people, not twelve. Lexington County's own fee schedule lists a $5.00 jury panel summoning charge for civil cases, but it is billed as a cost against whichever side loses, not a fee you prepay to make the demand — and we found that figure on only one county's page so far, so treat it as a lead rather than a confirmed statewide number.

Documentation quality varies a lot by county, the same as it does in Georgia. Lexington, Chester and Beaufort each publish a specific, current-looking breakdown of eviction fees. Richland, Greenville, Horry and Charleston — the state's four largest counties by population — each have a magistrate court web page, but none of the ones we could load included a dollar figure for an eviction filing, and Charleston County's site blocked every request we made to it. Where a county publishes nothing we could read, this site gives you the clerk's phone number rather than a number we made up.

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