South Carolina Small Business Statistics, 2026 Edition

Foreign-owned companies sign roughly one in ten of South Carolina’s private paychecks; homegrown small businesses sign more than four in ten, and the small business column runs 530,402 firms deep. That covers 99.4% of every company in the state, with 863,326 people employed.

Private employment grew 1.7% in 2024, new business applications reached about 94,104 in 2025, the second-highest year in the Census series, and the foreign-affiliate payroll has climbed 75% since 2007.

Sources are federal and state primaries only; the list at the bottom links each one.

The Small Firms on South Carolina’s Books

The 530,402 small businesses in the SBA’s 2025 South Carolina profile amount to 99.4% of roughly 533,600 companies, about 22,800 more than the 2024 edition carried. Small business employment here grew 21.3% between 1998 and 2022, ahead of the national pace, per the profile’s own callout.

• 90,365 small employer firms represent 96.8% of all South Carolina employers, with a $39.2 billion payroll, 38.1% of the state total (2022).
• 440,037 nonemployer businesses earned $22.89 billion in 2022 receipts; 89.5% of them are sole proprietorships.
• The BLS logs 186,229 private establishments for 2024, 190,505 once government offices are included.
• Counting solo ventures, other services leads at 68,832 small firms, then professional services (63,369), construction (57,078) and administrative services (56,800).

Retail Outranks Health Care on South Carolina Payrolls

Line up the private sectors by headcount and retail comes first: 267,783 jobs, about 14.0% of the total. Manufacturing follows at 263,741, on pay 24.7% above the state average, though its 2024 growth was flat at 0.3%. The federal files list industries, not companies; the state’s biggest names appear only as cells inside them.

• Accommodation and food services holds third place, 245,086 jobs, on the lowest pay in the table.
• Health care sits fourth at 244,232, yet it added more jobs in 2024 than any other sector, 12,295.
• No sector operates more establishments than professional, scientific and technical services, 33,212 in all, averaging $97,732 a year.
• Utilities pays the top average, $113,620, ahead of management of companies ($107,076) and information ($102,324); scientific R&D reaches $133,968 at the sub-cell level.
• The floor: accommodation and food at $25,780, arts and recreation at $27,955, retail at $37,991; the statewide private average is $60,720.
• 87.0% of manufacturing employers are small firms, 3,079 of them, employing 75,746 people, 29.8% of the sector (2022).

Transportation Equipment: South Carolina’s Factory Signature

One subsector explains much of the factory story. Transportation equipment employs 53,248 people, 20.2% of all South Carolina manufacturing, at $82,813 average pay, 36.4% above the private norm, and it grew 3.1% in a year when manufacturing overall added 0.3%. Textile mills, by contrast, now rank eighth among the subsectors at 11,268 jobs, a fifth the size of transportation equipment.

• Motor vehicle manufacturing employs 15,229 (up 5.6%), with motor vehicle parts at 21,287.
• Aerospace products and parts grew fastest of the sizable subsectors, up 13.5% to 8,816 jobs at $117,594, 93.7% above the private average.
• Tire manufacturing runs 11,080 jobs at $81,351, up 4.1%.
• Charleston County’s transportation equipment cell pays $110,255 across 10,056 jobs (up 8.5%); Spartanburg County holds the largest county cell, 17,161 jobs.

The Foreign Payroll in South Carolina

Search for foreign companies in South Carolina and the best-measured answer is a payroll figure. Majority-owned U.S. affiliates of foreign multinationals employed 194,800 South Carolinians in 2024, per the BEA’s July 2026 release, which works out to roughly one private job in ten here; the BEA’s own printed share, 6.1%, is the national figure.

• Manufacturing accounts for 106,500 of those jobs, 54.7%, equal to about 40.4% of all manufacturing employment in the state.
• Germany leads the owner countries at 46,200 jobs, then France (23,700), Canada (22,700), Japan (19,100) and the United Kingdom (18,300).
• The affiliate payroll has grown from 111,300 jobs in 2007 to 194,800 in 2024, up 75%.

Three sourced facts sit next to each other here: manufacturing pay runs 24.7% above the state average, transportation equipment keeps growing, and four factory jobs in ten sit with a foreign-owned employer. The reader can hold all three at once.

Small Business Growth in South Carolina, One Sector at a Time

The growth question has a clean 2024 answer: 31,292 more private jobs statewide, a 1.7% rise. Real output moved the same direction, up 4.5% in 2024 and 3.1% in 2025 in inflation-adjusted terms. Greenville County, the state’s largest by private employment, matched the statewide pace: 264,506 jobs, 5,043 of them new, up 1.9%.

• Health care outpaced every other sizeable sector, up 5.3%, and led all of them in absolute gains, 12,295 jobs.
• Construction followed at 5.0% (5,611 jobs) and other services at 4.8%.
• Educational services rose 4.3%, professional services 4.1% (5,259 jobs), arts and recreation 3.8%.

Losses were narrower. Agriculture thinned 3.6% and information 3.3%, while administrative and waste services dropped the most positions, 3,635, a 2.3% dip driven by employment services alone shedding 4,677; management of companies eased 1.7% and transportation and warehousing 1.4%, mostly in warehousing.

A Second-Best Year on Record for South Carolina Filings

Stack the monthly Census filings into yearly totals, close approximations by construction, and the shape is plain. South Carolina applications ran about 49,300 in 2018 and 51,500 in 2019, jumped 38% in 2020, and peaked at 96,369 in 2021. The four years since read 90,774, then 91,814, then 86,364, then a 9.0% snap back to 94,104 in 2025, the second-highest total on record and about 83% above 2019.

The churn behind those filings cooled between the two most recent windows: a net 7,718 more establishments opened than closed from March 2022 to March 2023, then a net 3,114 the following year, with net job creation easing from 69,011 to 35,780 (every size counted, temporary closures included). Small businesses supplied 25,358 of the latter, 70.9%.

Where the Financing Went, and What the Exporters Sold

Two money flows tell the FY2024 story: SBA lending expanded on two of its three programs, while exports rose to $34.5 billion.

The Census identified 6,261 exporting firms in 2023 shipping that $34.5 billion in goods, up from $28.7 billion a year earlier. Small firms number 5,246 of them, 83.8%, but their dollars held at $3.8 billion while the total surged, so the small-firm share of value eased from 13.2% to 11.2%, with no cause given in the data.

Three SBA Programs, Two of Them Up

SBA lenders approved 805 7(a) loans for $437.3 million in fiscal 2024, 18.2% more loans and 17.7% more dollars than fiscal 2023, on the 7(a) side alone. All programs together placed about 843 loans and $487.6 million.

• The 504 program jumped to 38 loans and $50.3 million, up 35.7% and 46.7% on its own trend.
• Microloans were the one contraction: 85 loans and $1.86 million, dollars down 7.8%.
• District SC-01, along the coast around Charleston, led on both measures: 156 loans, $75.1 million.
• Banks reported $1.4 billion in Community Reinvestment Act loans to firms under $1 million in revenue in 2023, off 2022’s $1.6 billion.

South Carolina Ownership by the 2022 Census Count

The 2022 ownership surveys put 106,851 businesses in Black ownership, one of the strongest lines in the state’s table as printed, and 96.4% of them operate without employees (3,851 employer firms).

• Women own 46.3% of South Carolina businesses: 18,824 employer firms, plus 7,297 owned equally with men.
• Veterans own 8.4% of businesses against 5.9% of the workforce: 39,059 in all, 6,059 with employees.
• Hispanic owners hold 30,865 businesses (2,365 employer); Asian owners 20,293 (5,793 employer).
• The rural share comes to 27.5%: 130,529 rural businesses against 344,195 urban.

The Myrtle Beach Share of a $23.8 Billion Year

For scale, South Carolina’s current-dollar output stood at $378.8 billion in 2025, against $357.1 billion in 2024. Travel is measured separately, by the state’s own tourism research, and 2024 came to $23.8 billion in direct visitor spending, up 0.9%.

The SCPRT’s 2024 study, prepared by Dean Runyan Associates and published in March 2026, counts 143,880 jobs generated directly by that spending, 100,056 of them in accommodations and food service.

• Horry County took $6.3 billion of the spending, 26% of the state, by the report’s split; Charleston County followed at $5.0 billion.
• Travel produced $2.12 billion in state and local tax revenue, about $840 per household by the report’s own math.
• The study’s broadest measure, $30.6 billion of total travel-related activity, supports roughly 241,000 jobs, one in every ten statewide as the report puts it.
• Visitors put $6.8 billion into accommodations, up 3.0%, and direct travel employment grew by 2,340 jobs.

Set two independent sources side by side and Myrtle Beach explains itself: the tourism office assigns Horry County 26% of the state’s travel dollars, and the federal jobs file shows accommodation and food service carrying 24.9% of the county’s private employment, at county pay 24.4% below the state average.

The $110 Start and the Report You Never File

A default South Carolina LLC files its Articles of Organization once, and then the Secretary of State’s calendar goes quiet: no annual report exists for it in the statute, and the fee schedule carries no annual line.

Fees Fixed by Statute

The Articles cost $110, set by S.C. Code 33-44-1204, with no online or paper split to weigh. Reserving a name first costs $25, and a certificate of existence costs $10 from the office itself; the Secretary of State’s page carries a scam alert about third parties charging hundreds for that same document. The filing path is mapped in our guide to starting an LLC in South Carolina, which tracks each statutory step in order.

The one recurring obligation belongs to tax elections, not to the registry. An LLC that chooses corporate taxation files the CL-1, whose own instructions read “LLCs should only complete the CL-1 if they’re taxed as a corporation,” pays the $25 minimum license fee, then the annual license fee on the SC1120: 0.1% of capital stock and paid-in surplus, plus $15, never less than $25.

Every LLC keeps a registered agent and a designated office in the state, at a street address (S.C. Code 33-44-108); our comparison of registered agent services in South Carolina covers who can fill the role.

Filing solo is not required, either; this site’s ranking of the best LLC services in South Carolina covers the providers that handle it end to end.

The Elective Flat Rate and the Rest of the Tax Bill

South Carolina’s income tax tops out at 6.0% for tax year 2025, the latest step of a printed staircase that read 7% in 2021, then 6.5%, 6.4% and 6.2% on the way down. The state’s distinctive option: active trade or business income from a pass-through can be taxed at a flat 3% instead, an annual election on Form I-335 that pays off above $17,830 of taxable income, and since 2021 the 3% can be paid at the entity level. Corporations pay 5%.

• Sales tax is 6% at the state level; the DOR’s own municipal chart prints Greenville at 6% with no local tax, Columbia at 8%, Charleston and Myrtle Beach at 9%.
• Unprepared food is exempt from the state sales tax, a rule on the books since November 2007; printed local food rates run 0% in Greenville and Myrtle Beach, 2% in Columbia and Charleston.
• There is no state minimum wage law; employers covered by the FLSA pay the federal $7.25.

The state asks for $110 on the way in and nothing on the yearly registry calendar; what it does tax, it now taxes at rates that have fallen four years running.

Reader Follow-Ups on the South Carolina Data

Sources

• Counts, churn, ownership and export tables originate in the SBA Office of Advocacy’s 2025 South Carolina Small Business Profile.
• Sector, subsector and county cells for 2024 are quoted from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Monthly application data stacks up in the Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics; the solo-business totals are the province of its Nonemployer Statistics.
• FY2024 loan sums were rebuilt district by district from the SBA’s 7(a) and 504 FOIA datasets.
• GDP levels rest on the Bureau of Economic Analysis regional accounts.
• The foreign-affiliate employment figures are the BEA’s too, from its Activities of U.S. Affiliates of Foreign Multinational Enterprises tables.
• Every statutory fee and the no-annual-report rule are written into Title 33, Chapter 44 of the S.C. Code.
• Tax rates, municipal charts and the grocery exemption are the South Carolina Department of Revenue‘s own publications.
• The 2024 travel figures were reported through the SCPRT’s economic-impact research with Dean Runyan Associates.