South Carolina Golf Carts: $5 Permit Decal, Four-Mile Radius, Daylight by Default

South Carolina rewrote its golf cart law in 2025. Act No. 64 of 2025, from H. 3292, was ratified on 20 May and approved by the Governor on 22 May 2025, taking effect on approval. It added Section 56-2-90 to Article 1 of Chapter 2, Title 56 and repealed Section 56-2-105, which had governed carts since 2012 Act No. 177 and had been amended in 2015 and again in 2016. Anyone working from the old section number is reading a provision the code now prints simply as repealed.

The permit itself is cheap and short lived. The owner applies to the Department of Motor Vehicles for a permit decal and a registration certificate, providing proof of ownership, proof of liability insurance and a five dollar fee. The decal must be replaced every five years, or at the time the owner changes address, whichever is sooner, so a move within the State restarts the clock even if the decal is nearly new. The insurance must conform to Section 38-77-140, which sets the State's minimum automobile liability limits at twenty-five thousand dollars for bodily injury to one person, fifty thousand dollars where two or more people are injured in one accident, and twenty-five thousand dollars for property damage.

The operator must be at least sixteen years of age, hold a valid driver's license, and carry three things on the cart: the registration certificate, proof of the Section 38-77-140 insurance, and the driver's license. There is no learner or under-sixteen allowance anywhere in the section.

Subsection (D) sets the default operating envelope, and it applies only in the absence of a local ordinance. A permitted cart may be operated only during daylight hours, only on a secondary highway where the speed limit is thirty-five miles per hour or less, and only within four miles of the address on the registration certificate. Where that address sits inside a gated community, the four miles is measured instead from a point of ingress and egress of the gated community, which is the drafting that makes the rule workable on Hilton Head Island and in the Grand Strand's gated developments: the radius runs from the gate rather than from each individual driveway. A cart may cross a highway at an intersection even where the speed limit there exceeds thirty-five miles an hour.

Municipalities, and counties within their unincorporated portions, can displace those defaults. Under subsection (C) a local government may by ordinance stipulate the hours, methods and locations of golf cart operation, and may by ordinance permit night operation provided the cart carries working headlights and taillights. Both powers are capped by the same ceiling: carts may be operated only on a highway where the speed limit is thirty-five miles per hour or less. A city or county may also designate separate golf cart paths on the shoulder of primary highways, secondary highways, streets and roads, provided it obtains any necessary approvals and the path is separated from the traffic lanes by a hard concrete curb, by parking spaces, or by a distance of four feet or more.

One local power was expressly taken away. Subsection (C)(4) provides that a municipality or county may not require proof of property ownership, or proof of a long-term rental agreement within its limits, as a condition of receiving a decal to operate a golf cart there. Coastal towns that had limited decals to resident property owners cannot do so under the 2025 act.

The act also added a child restraint rule that the old section did not carry. Under subsection (E), every golf cart passenger under the age of twelve must wear a fastened safety belt when the cart is operated on the public streets and highways of this State.

Finally, a golf cart is not a low speed vehicle in South Carolina, and cannot become one. Low speed vehicles are governed separately by Sections 56-2-100 through 56-2-130: an LSV must meet Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 500 at 49 C.F.R. Section 571.500, must be titled and registered and insured in the same fashion as a passenger vehicle, and carries a special size and class of licence plate the Department establishes for LSVs. Section 56-2-120(A) then shuts the conversion route: the State shall not issue vehicle identification numbers to homemade low speed vehicles, retrofitted golf carts, or any other similar vehicles, and those vehicles do not qualify as low speed vehicles in this State. A county, a municipality or the Department of Transportation may additionally prohibit LSV operation on any street or highway in the interest of safety under Section 56-2-100(E) and (F).

Chapter 2 of Title 56 carries its own general penalty. Section 56-2-4000 makes it a misdemeanor to violate any provision of the chapter, and provides that a person convicted of a violation for which no other penalty is fixed must be punished by a fine of not more than one hundred dollars or by imprisonment for not more than thirty days. That is the exposure for operating a cart without the permit decal, outside the four-mile radius, after dark in a jurisdiction that has not adopted a night ordinance, on a road posted above thirty-five miles per hour, or with an under-twelve passenger unbelted.

Because the permit decal and registration certificate are Department of Motor Vehicles documents, an owner who lets the five-year decal lapse, or who moves without replacing it, is operating an unregistered cart rather than merely a mis-documented one. The operator requirements sit on the driver personally: the section requires the licence, the registration certificate and the insurance proof to be in his possession while the cart is on a public highway.