Charleston, SC Noise Ordinances: Barking Dogs (2026)

Section 5-18 states that no person may own, possess, harbor, control, or keep on any premises a dog that barks or howls so as to cause excessive noise, as defined in § 5-1, which disturbs the peace of the neighborhood. Section 5-1 supplies the numeric trigger: excessive noise, for purposes of the animal control chapter only, means sound produced by an animal that occurs consistently and exceeds 20 minutes. That 20-minute, consistent-duration standard is what an animal control officer or the municipal court applies rather than a subjective loudness test, which makes a barking complaint easier to document with a timestamped log of when the barking started and how long it continued.

Section 5-16 separately treats habitual or repeated barking or snapping at pedestrians, bicyclists, or vehicles as a public nuisance in its own right, alongside conduct like turning over garbage pails or damaging a neighbor's property, which gives the city two overlapping legal hooks (§ 5-16 nuisance and § 5-18 noise) for a chronic barking dog depending on how the officer documents the complaint. Both sections apply regardless of whether the dog is confined to its own owner's property; keeping it on your own premises is not a defense once the noise or nuisance threshold is met.