Where to Buy a Business in South Carolina
The Opportunity
Buyable Businesses
17,071
1.6% of the U.S. total
Per 100k Residents
311.6
#23 of 51 states by buyable count
SBA Acquisition Loans
508
$622M since FY2020, 111 of them in FY2025
Median SBA Deal
$750k
FY2020 through FY2025
South Carolina holds 17,071 businesses a searcher could realistically buy across the trades this site covers: establishments with 5 to 99 employees, big enough to have something to sell, small enough to finance. That is 1.6% of the country's buyable market and ranks South Carolina #23 among the states. The number that decides a search, though, is not the state total but where inside the state those businesses sit.
The Deepest Counties in South Carolina
Nobody searches South Carolina. They search a metro they can drive across to meet an owner. These are the counties with the most buyable targets in the covered trades, Greenville deepest among them.
| Greenville | 2,029 | 11.9% |
| Charleston | 1,941 | 11.4% |
| Horry | 1,542 | 9% |
| Richland | 1,266 | 7.4% |
| Lexington | 1,108 | 6.5% |
| Spartanburg | 968 | 5.7% |
| York | 850 | 5% |
| Beaufort | 782 | 4.6% |
| Anderson | 596 | 3.5% |
| Berkeley | 533 | 3.1% |
What Trades Run Deepest in South Carolina
- Full-Service Restaurants3,411 buyable
- Limited-Service Restaurants3,354 buyable
- Gasoline Stations with Convenience Stores1,443 buyable
- Offices of Dentists1,240 buyable
- Plumbing, Heating, and Air-Conditioning Contractors752 buyable
- Child Day Care Services751 buyable
Each trade's pricing, licensing, and diligence live in its Industry Buy Guide. The financing side is in South Carolina's SBA acquisition-lending profile. The same counts industry by industry across every state are in Where the Businesses Are, and several of these trades restrict who can own at all: the Ownership & License Rules table names which.
Before You Close in South Carolina
On a transfer of most of a business's assets, tax due on or before the transfer is a lien against those assets in the buyer's hands, and the state may refuse the buyer a license to carry on the business until it is settled. South Carolina publishes this under S.C. Code Ann. section 12-54-124, and what releases the buyer is the Certificate of Compliance, Form C-268, obtained no more than thirty days before the transfer.
Read at source on scstatehouse.gov. Every state runs a version of this rule and the wording decides what a closing has to do, so treat it as the question to put to a lawyer in South Carolina rather than as the answer.
Next Door to South Carolina
Nobody buys a state. These are the states South Carolina touches, with the buyable businesses each holds in the same 29 trades.
- Georgia32,450 buyable
- North Carolina35,566 buyable
Method & Source
Buyable counts are establishments with 5 to 99 employees in the 29 covered trades, summed from the Census County Business Patterns (2023). A county total is a lower bound: Census suppresses cells thin enough to identify a single business, and a trade we have not written a guide for is not counted. SBA figures are change-of-ownership 7(a) approvals (FY2020 through FY2025), approvals rather than closings.