South Carolina's records statute is Chapter 4 of Title 30, and its preamble is quoted by the Attorney General on the office's records page: the General Assembly found it vital in a democratic society that public business be performed in an open and public manner, and directed that the chapter be construed so as to make it possible for citizens, or their representatives, to learn and report fully the activities of their public officials at a minimum cost or delay. The right itself, in section 30-4-30(A)(1), is to inspect, copy or receive an electronic transmission of any public record of a public body, subject to the exemptions and to reasonable rules about the time and place of access, and a public record is defined widely as documentary material of any physical form prepared, owned, used, possessed or retained by a public body.
Two limits are built into the right. A body is not required to create an electronic version of a record that does not exist in order to answer a request, and the Attorney General adds that the Act does not require agencies to create new records or to conduct research, analyse data or answer questions. Requests must be in writing. The right also does not extend to people serving a sentence of imprisonment in a state, county or federal facility, although that does not touch their constitutional right to call for evidence in their favour in a criminal prosecution. For South Carolina records held locally, see the South Carolina county pages.
- Ten business days to decide: the body must give its determination and reasons within ten days excluding weekends and legal holidays, or twenty for records over twenty four months old.
- Thirty calendar days to produce: granted records follow within thirty days of the determination, thirty five for older records, or from the day a deposit is paid.
- Silence equals approval: where no written notification goes out in time, the request must be considered approved as to all nonexempt records.
- No charge for the review: fees cannot cover the examination that decides whether documents are disclosable, and the hourly rate is capped at the lowest capable employee's salary.
Written by SearchSystems.net from South Carolina's own systems: the South Carolina Freedom of Information Act, Title 30 Chapter 4, the South Carolina Attorney General on the Act, the State Fiscal Accountability Authority records page and fee schedule, the Department of Administration request page, the Secretary of State's records policy and fee schedule, each read on October 15, 2026 by the SearchSystems editorial team.
Two deadlines, and the consequence of missing the first
The structure put in place by the 2017 amendment is a determination followed by a production. On written request, a public body must within ten days, excluding Saturdays, Sundays and legal public holidays, notify the requester of its determination and the reasons for it, and where the record is more than twenty four months old at the date of the request it has twenty such days instead. That notification is the final opinion of the body on whether the record is publicly available, although it need not resolve every question about redacting particular passages.
If the request is granted, the record must be furnished or made available no later than thirty calendar days from the date the final determination was provided, or thirty five calendar days where the records are more than twenty four months old. Where the body requires a deposit, those same thirty or thirty five day periods run instead from the date the deposit is received, and the full cost must be paid at the time of production.
Miss the first deadline and the statute decides the point: if written notification is neither mailed, electronically transmitted nor personally delivered within the time set, the request must be considered approved as to nonexempt records or information. The exemptions survive that failure, so a late body does not have to hand over genuinely exempt material, but it loses the argument about everything else. All of these periods can be extended by written mutual agreement, which the statute says is not to be unreasonably withheld.
The fee rules, read from the statute rather than the invoice
A public body may collect reasonable fees not exceeding the actual cost of the search, retrieval and redaction of records, and must develop a fee schedule and post it online, which makes the schedule the first document to ask for. Three limits matter. The charge for search, retrieval or redaction may not exceed the prorated hourly salary of the lowest paid employee who, in the reasonable discretion of the custodian, has the necessary skill and training to do the work.
Fees must be uniform for copies of the same record and may not exceed the prevailing commercial rate for producing copies. And no fee at all may be charged for the examination and review needed to decide whether documents are subject to disclosure, which is the review a body is most tempted to bill for. Copy charges may not be applied to records transmitted electronically, although where records exist only on paper and the body agrees to supply them electronically it may charge for the staff time spent converting them.
Records must be furnished at the lowest possible cost and in a form convenient and practical for the requester where that is equally convenient for the body, and a body may waive or reduce charges where it decides that furnishing the information primarily benefits the general public. A deposit of up to twenty five per cent of the total reasonably anticipated reproduction cost may be required before the body searches or copies.
In practice the schedules are modest: the State Fiscal Accountability Authority publishes twenty cents a page for fifty pages or more, the lowest paid responding employee's prorated wage for administrative time of an hour or more, actual cost for postage or fax expense of two dollars or more, and actual cost for developing or running a computer program.
The records you can walk in and read
Section 30-4-30(D) lists material that must be available for inspection and copying during the body's hours of operation without any written request at all, where the requester appears in person. There are four categories: the minutes of the body's meetings for the preceding six months; all reports identified in section 30-4-50(A)(8) for at least the fourteen day period before the current day, which is the law enforcement blotter material; documents identifying people confined in a jail, detention centre or prison for the preceding three months; and every document produced by the body or its agent that was distributed to or reviewed by a member during a public meeting in the preceding six months.
A body that posts those records on a publicly available website, in a form convenient and practical for use, is treated as complying with that subsection, although it must still produce documents on request under the rest of the section. For anyone tracking a council or a sheriff's office in South Carolina, that last category, the meeting packet, is the one most often overlooked.
Going to court, and the six month rule
Enforcement runs through the circuit court, and the 2017 amendment put speed into it. A citizen of the state may apply for a declaratory judgment, an injunction or both, no later than one year after the alleged violation or one year after a public vote in public session, whichever is later. On filing, the chief administrative judge must schedule an initial hearing within ten days of service on all parties, and where the court cannot rule finally at that hearing it must set a scheduling order aimed at concluding the action within six months of filing, extendable for good cause.
A violation of the chapter must be treated as an irreparable injury for which no adequate remedy at law exists, which removes the usual argument against injunctive relief. A requester who prevails may be awarded reasonable attorney fees and other costs of litigation specific to the request, and one who prevails in part may be awarded fees or an appropriate portion of them at the court's discretion.
When the public body goes to court first
South Carolina also gives the other side a door. Under section 30-4-110 a public body may file its own request for a hearing to seek relief from requests it considers unduly burdensome, overly broad, vague, repetitive or otherwise improper, or where it has received a request but cannot make a good faith determination whether the information is exempt. A person or entity with a specific interest in the underlying records may also ask for a hearing, or intervene in an existing action, where disclosure might release material covered by certain exemptions including trade secrets, personal privacy, matters exempted by other statutes, proposed contracts and economic development material.
The remedies in that section run both ways: a successful party may obtain equitable relief, actual or compensatory damages, and reasonable attorney fees and costs, except that a finding of good faith bars any fee award, and a judicial determination that records are not subject to disclosure is itself a finding of good faith that bars fees even if reversed on appeal. One sanction remains for bad behaviour: where a court finds that a public body has arbitrarily and capriciously violated the chapter by refusing or delaying disclosure, it may impose a civil fine of five hundred dollars on top of damages or equitable relief. The criminal penalties that used to sit in this section were removed in 2017.
Reading a South Carolina response
Count business days first, because the determination letter is where most disputes are won. If nothing arrived inside ten working days, or twenty for records older than two years, the request stands approved as to everything not exempt, and that is worth saying in writing to the body. If a determination arrived, the production clock is thirty calendar days from its date, or from the day any deposit cleared. Then read the invoice against the statute: no charge for the exemption review, nothing per page for an electronic transmission, no rate above the lowest capable employee's prorated salary, and no departure from the schedule the body is required to publish online.
And where the material wanted is recent minutes, a meeting packet, the fourteen day police reports or the past three months of jail bookings, the Act allows a walk in inspection with no written request at all.
Questions about public records requests in South Carolina
Related South Carolina records
South Carolina's other public records guides on this site are the South Carolina background check guide for the Law Enforcement Division criminal history service, the South Carolina court records guide for the public index, the South Carolina arrest records guide for what a booking makes public, and the South Carolina county pages for every county office.