What the Magistrate Court Clerk charges to file an eviction or a small claims case, what the sheriff charges to serve it, and how to ask the court to waive the fees.
This is a floor, not a total. It adds up only the components this county actually publishes — the missing pieces below will push it higher. Attorney fees, if you use one, are on top of this and are not included.
Everything the clerk charges on an eviction or small claims case in Dorchester County. The figures set by state statute are verified and apply here. A dash means we have not yet read this county’s own schedule — not that the fee is zero.
| Fee | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Eviction filing — possession + rent claim | — | |
| Eviction filing — possession only | $50 | South Carolina's ejectment action is possession-only, and the total we could confirm on current county schedules is $50.00: a $20.00 filing fee, a $10.00 service fee, a $10.00 assessment under § 22-3-340, and $10.00 for the writ of ejectment. It can run $55.00 in a specific case if the tenant had to be served by posting and mail rather than in person, but that is a per-case difference, not a per-county one. |
| Appearance fee — eviction defendant | — | |
| Appearance fee — small claims defendant | — | |
| Jury demand — 12 jurors | — | There is no twelve-person jury option in a South Carolina magistrate court eviction. Magistrate court juries are six people under S.C. Code § 22-3-545(B)(1), and that is the jury a party gets if they demand one under § 27-37-80. |
| Jury demand — 6 jurors | $5 | Either the landlord or the tenant can demand a jury in an ejectment case under S.C. Code § 27-37-80. The one figure we found, on Lexington County's official fee schedule, is a $5.00 jury panel summoning charge, billed as a cost against whichever side loses rather than a fee prepaid to make the demand. We found this on only one county's page, so treat it as unconfirmed for the rest of the state. |
| Jury demand — small claims | $5 | South Carolina does not run a separate small-claims jury procedure — the same magistrate civil case and the same $5.00 jury panel summoning charge described above would apply, since small claims and eviction share the same court and the same $7,500 jurisdiction. |
| Mediation fee | — | We found no statewide mediation fee for eviction or small claims cases in magistrate court on any page we checked. A county could offer a local voluntary mediation program with its own charge, but that would be set locally, not by state law. |
| E-filing surcharge | — | We found no statewide e-filing system for magistrate court civil cases at all, so there is no e-filing surcharge to report. |
The filing fee is not the whole bill. Somebody has to serve the defendant, and in South Carolina the sheriff sets that price county by county — it is the most variable number on this page. Service of the initial papers and issuance of the writ of ejectment both run $10.00 flat in every county whose schedule we could read (Lexington, Chester, Beaufort) — the same figure whether the county uses the Sheriff or a constable to do the serving. A $5.00 mail-verification add-on can apply on top of the service fee only when personal service was not possible.
$10.00 to serve the initial ejectment papers, the same figure on every current county schedule we could read (Lexington, Chester, Beaufort), regardless of whether the county uses the Sheriff or a magistrate-appointed constable to do the serving.
$10.00 to issue the writ of ejectment once the magistrate rules for the landlord. This is the fee to issue the writ, not a separate lockout or removal charge — none of the counties we checked published an additional dollar figure for physically carrying it out.
South Carolina courts will waive court fees, costs, and charges for people below certain income levels, under S.C. Code Ann. § 8-21-1020 and S.C. Code Ann. § 8-21-1020. South Carolina has no single statewide form: the Magistrate Court Clerk hands you the court's own affidavit when you ask.
| The court waives | If your available income is |
|---|---|
| Full | S.C. Code § 8-21-1020 lets a magistrate relieve a person from magistrate court costs upon "the showing and finding by the magistrate as provided in Section 8-21-1040." We read § 8-21-1040 in full and it is about paying mileage to constables, not about indigency, so we could not determine the actual income or asset test a magistrate applies. We are not going to describe a test we could not find. |
We can confirm South Carolina magistrate court has a cost-waiver mechanism by statute, and every other state we have checked so far is all-or-nothing rather than graduated, but we could not confirm whether South Carolina's is graduated or all-or-nothing because the statute's own cross-reference to the test does not lead anywhere that describes one. Ask the clerk directly if you need a waiver.
Fee waiver information verified July 31, 2026 against the Illinois General Assembly statute text and the Illinois Courts approved-forms library. We report what the statute and the form say. We cannot tell you whether you qualify — that is the court's decision.
Dorchester County Circuit Court
Magistrate Court Clerk
No clerk website found. Contact the county courthouse directly.
We found no dedicated statewide e-filing portal for Magistrate Court civil cases, unlike Georgia's PeachCourt or Florida's e-filing portal. Every county page we checked describes filing an ejectment or small claims case on paper at the magistrate's counter, and none mentioned an online filing option for evictions. We are not naming a portal we could not confirm exists. eFileIL →
We publish the court's and clerk's own contact information and link to their pages. We do not take your information, route you to anyone, or file anything on your behalf. For questions about court procedure — as opposed to what it costs — use the Illinois Courts self-help center.
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.
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.
Statutory backbone: 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. Statute text checked July 31, 2026.
Compiled and verified by David Scott. We re-check every source document monthly and re-read any county whose schedule has changed. If the clerk quotes you something different from what is on this page, tell us and we will fix it. Read the full methodology.