Florence County, SC Building Safety: Plumbing Permits (2026)

Florence County Code § 7-11 places plumbing work within the same administrative framework as every other trade: the 2021 South Carolina Plumbing Code, Chapter 1, Scope and Administration, governs permitting, inspection and enforcement for plumbing installations anywhere in the unincorporated county, alongside the parallel adoption of the 2021 Building, Residential, Mechanical, Fuel Gas, Fire and Existing Building Codes and the 2020 National Electrical Code. This adoption sits in Article II, Division 1 of Chapter 7, Building Regulations, which the county's Building Inspection Division administers; the eight incorporated municipalities within the county, including the City of Florence, run separate permitting under their own codes and are not covered by this provision.

The clearest published dollar figure for a plumbing permit in the county's own text is the $20.00 plumbing permit line item in the mobile home fee schedule at § 7-24, listed next to a $40.00 mobile home permit and $20.00 electrical and mechanical permits. That schedule was set by Ord. No. 31-96/97 in 1997 and has not been superseded in the exported code. Site-built plumbing permits are issued and inspected by the same Building Inspection Division under the adopted state code's own fee and inspection procedures.

Chapter 7 does not carve out a separate penalty for plumbing work performed without a permit. Where the code is silent on a specific fine, § 1-13's general penalty applies to the failure to obtain any required permit, and that provision expressly makes each additional day of noncompliance a new, separately punishable offense until the permit is secured.