Property taxes: the 4% and the 6%

South Carolina does not tax you on your home’s value. It taxes you on an assessment, which is a percentage of that value, and the percentage depends on what the property is to you.

Under SC Code § 12-43-220(c), an owner-occupied legal residence is taxed on an assessment equal to four percentof fair market value. Under § 12-43-220(e), all other real property not otherwise provided for is taxed on an assessment equal to six percent. A second home, a rental, a property you bought to hold — all of it sits in the six.

The four percent is not automatic. The statute requires the owner or their agent to apply for it before the first penalty date for the payment of taxes for the first tax year in which they claim it. Nobody applies it for you because nobody but you knows the house became your legal residence.

Here is the part that gets left out of the four-versus-six summary, and it is often bigger than the ratio itself.

SC Code § 12-37-220(B)(47) — the provision everyone here calls Act 388 — exempts a property receiving the four percent owner-occupied ratio from all property taxes imposed for school operating purposes. Not from millage imposed to repay general obligation debt, and the statute is explicit about that carve-out. But school operating millage is typically the largest single component of a South Carolina tax bill.

So the gap between a primary residence and a second home is not “six versus four”. It is a higher assessment ratio and the loss of an exemption that removes the biggest line on the bill. Two identical houses on the same street, one lived in and one not, are not taxed a little differently. They are taxed on a different basis.

This is the one that catches people, and it is why the seller’s tax bill tells you very little.

South Carolina limits how fast an assessed value can climb during a routine countywide reassessment: § 12-37-3140(B) caps that increase at fifteen percent within a five-year period. Buyers hear about the cap and reasonably assume it protects them.

It does not protect a new owner, because the same subsection says the limit does notapply to the fair market value of real property when an assessable transfer of interest occurred, in the year that transfer value is first subject to tax. And § 12-37-3140(A)(1) sets the value at the later of the base year or the 31st of December of the year in which that transfer happened.

In plain terms: a sale is an assessable transfer of interest, and it hands the assessor a fresh, uncapped market value. The Beaufort County Assessor puts it the same way in its own words — individual property reassessments are conducted in the year following a property sale, a non-exempt transfer of ownership, or the completion of new construction.

If the current owner has held the house a long time, their number reflects years of capped increases you will not inherit. Ask what the property will be assessed at after the transfer, not what it is assessed at today.

If the property is going to sit at the six percent ratio, there is a relief provision, and it is easy to miss because you have to ask for it.

SC Code § 12-37-3135 allows an exemption equal to twenty-five percent of the ATI fair market value for a parcel subject to the six percent ratio that has undergone an assessable transfer of interest. There is a floor built into the statute: the resulting value may not be less than the parcel’s current fair market value.

And it is conditional on notice. The exemption does not apply unless the owner, or the owner’s agent, notifies the county assessor that the property will be subject to the six percent ratio before the 31st of January of the tax year for which it is first claimed.

That is a real deadline attached to a real number, and it lands a few months after a closing, when an out-of-state buyer has gone home and stopped thinking about the county. It is worth putting in your calendar on the day you close.

One more line in § 12-43-220(c) matters to anyone thinking about renting out a place they also use: the four percent legal residence ratio is conditioned on the residence not being rented for more than seventy-two days in a calendar year.

Note what that is and is not. It is a tax condition. It is not permission to rent — whether you may rent at all, and on what terms, is answered by the jurisdiction your address actually sits in and then by the community’s own recorded documents, which can prohibit outright what the town would happily permit. Which rules apply to which address covers that side of it.