How to Start a Hair Salon in South Carolina

Who licenses hair salons in South Carolina

Hair salons answer to the Board of Cosmetology, one of the professional boards inside the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, under Title 40 Chapter 13 of the South Carolina Code of Laws and Chapter 35 of the state regulations. The board licenses six things: cosmetologists, estheticians, nail technicians, instructors, salons and booth renters. That list is the structure of this guide, because South Carolina licenses the room and the chair arrangement alongside the person, and each credential carries its own fee and its own renewal date.

The board also inspects salons and enforces the sanitation and licensing rules in Chapter 35. Two calendars run through everything it issues. Practitioner licenses expire on March 10 of odd numbered years, while salon and booth renter licenses run on a two year cycle that comes due June 30. An owner who tracks only one of those dates will spend half of every cycle with something expired, and the salon license section below explains why the salon's date cannot be fixed by renewing the people inside it.

South Carolina hair salon at a glance

The cosmetologist license, step by step

The cosmetologist license is South Carolina's broad practitioner credential, covering hair, skin and nail services under Chapter 13. Section 40-13-230 and the board's examination page set the route: be at least 16, hold a tenth grade education or its equivalent, and complete 1,500 hours of training at an approved school. You then sit for the NIC theory and practical examinations, administered for the board by Prov, and the passing score for cosmetology is 75 percent.

One timing rule decides applications before the exam does. Regulation 35-5 requires the examinations to be taken within 24 months of completing your training hours; wait longer and the hours become invalid. The board's January 2024 position softens the edge for candidates who attempted the exam inside the window, who may keep testing past it, but the safe plan is to test promptly after graduation. The application by examination costs $45 on the board's current licensure overview. The vendor's own per test charges are set by Prov and are not published on the board's pages, so budget for them at registration rather than from this guide.

South Carolina does not offer reciprocity. An out of state stylist arrives by endorsement, which costs $60 and requires either a NIC pass or an active license held for at least two years in the other state plus 4 hours of board approved continuing education. A Master Hair Care Specialist licensed by the barber board crosses over on an experience ladder: five years of specialist experience qualifies directly, four years takes 100 additional school hours, three years takes 200, and under three years takes 350. Renewal runs on the practitioner calendar: $52 every two years, with the license expiring March 10 of odd numbered years, and 4 contact hours of continuing education per cycle covering board laws and regulations, client safety or infection control, from board approved providers. First time renewers are exempt from the CE requirement, and Section 40-13-250(A) exempts long licensed practitioners, those licensed 15 consecutive years and aged 60 or older, or licensed 30 continuous years and aged 50 or older, with no discipline. A license expired three years or less can be reinstated with the fee and CE proof; beyond that, the route is re-examination.

The salon license and the licensed manager

The salon license is a separate application to the same board, filed at least 10 working days before you open, and the initial fee is $100. The application package requires a completed Self-Inspection Report, the board's checklist that the premises meet the sanitation and equipment rules before the first client sits down. It also requires a Salon Manager Form, and the manager rule is the structural fact of South Carolina salon ownership: the salon manager must be a current South Carolina licensed cosmetologist, esthetician or nail technician. An unlicensed owner therefore opens with a licensed manager named on the license, and a single chair owner operator satisfies the rule with their own license.

The salon license renews at $72 on the board's two year cycle, due June 30 under Regulation 35-15, which is a different date from every practitioner license in the building. What the license will not do is move. The board states that salon licenses are not transferable, including moving from one salon suite to another, even within the same building. A change of location requires a new application with the fee, submitted 20 working days before opening at the new address, and changes of ownership or name run through the new license process as well. Buy an existing salon, relocate a growing one, or rebrand the entity on paper, and the licensing step is a fresh salon license, not an amendment to the old one.

Forming your business entity

Most South Carolina hair salons form as a limited liability company under Title 33 Chapter 44, and the formation filing is simple by the standards of this series. Articles of Organization are filed with the Secretary of State, online through Business Entities Online or on paper, and the filing fee set by Section 33-44-1204 is $110. The articles name the company, its registered office and its registered agent, and the name must carry a limited liability company designator.

What a standard South Carolina LLC does not file is anything annual. Chapter 44 contains no annual report provision, so there is no yearly report and no yearly fee to the Secretary of State, and nothing to reinstate if a December passes quietly. The exception matters at tax time: an LLC that elects to be taxed as a corporation reports to the Department of Revenue instead, filing the initial report on Form CL-1 for $25 and paying an annual license fee with its corporate return, with a statutory minimum of $25. A sole proprietor files nothing with the Secretary of State at all, a position the names section below completes, because the trade name filing new owners expect to make does not exist here either.

Business names in a state with no DBA filing

South Carolina is the state in this series where the assumed name section is a single official sentence. The Secretary of State's business entities FAQ answers the question directly: the Secretary of State's Office does not register DBA or trade names. There is no statewide DBA registration for a sole proprietor, a partnership, an LLC or a corporation, and no county office picks the filing up. The only assumed name filing at the Secretary of State belongs to limited partnerships under Section 33-42-45, a structure no salon uses.

The same FAQ closes the neighboring questions: the Secretary of State does not issue retail licenses, which come from the Department of Revenue, or business licenses, which are issued at the city and county level. In practice a South Carolina trade name lives in three records rather than one filing: the trade name line on the federal EIN application, the local business license issued under Act 176, and the Department of Revenue accounts. Keep those three, the salon license and your signage telling the same story, because the bank, the landlord and the board will each compare the name in front of them against a different one of those records.

Federal tax ID and business banking

Apply for an Employer Identification Number on IRS.gov. It is free, it issues online in one session, and any site charging you for an EIN is selling you a form you can file yourself. South Carolina keys its registrations to the federal number: the Department of Revenue opens your retail license and withholding accounts against it, the Department of Employment and Workforce builds your unemployment account on it, and the trade name line on the application is one of the three places your salon's trading name is formally recorded in this state.

Open the business bank account as soon as the entity and the EIN exist, and run every fee, product order, rent payment and tax deposit through it. The quarterly unemployment wage reports, sales tax returns, board renewals and the spring local license all assume the salon can show its own books, and a clean, separate account is the cheapest compliance tool in this guide.

Sales tax through the Department of Revenue

South Carolina taxes retail sales of tangible personal property and only a short statutory list of services, communications, laundry and dry cleaning, accommodations, electricity and a few similar items, and hairdressing is not on the list. A haircut, color service or style is not a taxable sale in South Carolina, so you collect no sales tax on the service ticket. The statewide rate is 6 percent, and local option taxes added by counties and cities ride on top of taxable sales.

The retail shelf is the taxable side of the salon. Shampoo, styling products and other take home goods you sell are retail sales at 6 percent plus the local taxes at your address, and selling them requires a retail license from the Department of Revenue: $50 for each permanent retail location, non-refundable, and it does not expire. You apply through the Business Tax Application on MyDORWAY, and the same registration supports your withholding account when you hire. Buy resale inventory without paying tax under the retail license, and expect the mirror rule on your own purchases: the back bar supplies you consume and the equipment you use are taxable purchases, because nothing about them is resold. Keep services and products on separate lines at the register so the tax lands only where the statute puts it.

Booth rent in a South Carolina hair salon

South Carolina licenses the booth rental arrangement itself, which most states in this series leave to a lease and a practitioner license. A stylist renting a booth in a licensed salon holds two credentials: their own cosmetologist, esthetician or nail technician license, and a booth renter license from the Board of Cosmetology. The booth renter license costs $100 on the initial application and renews at $72 on the same June 30 two year cycle as the salon license, and the application asks for the renter's underlying practitioner license number, because the booth credential sits on top of it rather than replacing it.

The limit that shapes the rental market is transferability: a booth renter license does not move between salons. A renter who changes salons files a new application, at the initial fee, for the new address. For the salon owner, the structure cuts the other way from a suite building: the booth renter works inside your salon license and your premises, under your salon manager and your inspection record, so your compliance file should carry every renter's two license numbers alongside your own. The tax classification question stays separate and runs on control rather than labels: a renter who sets their own prices, books their own clients and pays a set rent reads as a tenant, and the paperwork should be written like the tenancy it claims to be. When the renter instead wants a door, a lock and a business the public experiences as its own, the suite guide in this cluster covers the salon license that room requires.

Hiring employees in South Carolina

Your first hire registers the salon as a South Carolina employer on two tracks. The Department of Employment and Workforce takes your employer registration through its SUITS portal, on the Employer Status Report, Form UCE-151, and the Department of Revenue takes the withholding registration. Unemployment insurance runs on the first $14,000 of each employee's wages, and for 2026 a new employer is assigned rate class 30: a 1.00 percent base rate plus the 0.06 percent Departmental Administrative Contingency Assessment, a 1.06 percent total, until the business has 12 months of liability and becomes experience rated. Experienced employer total rates for 2026 run from 0.06 percent to 5.46 percent, so the first year's rate is a starting point the salon's own claims history then moves.

South Carolina sets no state minimum wage, so the federal Fair Labor Standards Act floor governs: $7.25 an hour, with the federal tipped cash wage of $2.13 an hour where tips bring the total to $7.25, and a 2017 state law preempts cities and counties from setting a higher local wage, so the floor is the same in Charleston as in a rural county. Pay practice itself is regulated: LLR administers the state Payment of Wages Act, Title 41 Chapter 10, which governs how and when wages are paid and what a final paycheck requires. Workers compensation coverage belongs on the same first hire checklist, arranged through a private carrier in South Carolina's competitive market.

Local rules for a South Carolina hair salon

The local layer in South Carolina is not a patchwork a guide can only gesture at, because Act 176 of 2020, the Business License Tax Standardization Act at Sections 6-1-400 through 6-1-420, standardized its machinery statewide. Every city and town, and every county for unincorporated areas, that levies a business license tax must use the standard business license application, and the license year runs May 1 to April 30 everywhere, with every license expiring April 30. The tax is computed on the business's gross income for the preceding calendar year, projected or estimated for a new business opening mid stream.

What Act 176 deliberately did not standardize is the price. Jurisdictions adopt the Standardized Business License Class Schedule by ordinance, a NAICS based schedule recommended by the Municipal Association of South Carolina, and then set their own rates inside it, so the dollar figure is a property of the address and no honest statewide number exists. The operational consequences are three: a salon owes a separate license in each jurisdiction where it operates, the renewal lands every spring on the same April 30 date as every other business in the state, and the first year's tax is an estimate the second year trues up against real gross income. Zoning, occupancy and sign rules still sit underneath all of it, so get the zoning answer for salon use in writing before the lease is signed, while the state papers are still cheap to redo.

Insurance for a South Carolina hair salon

Chapter 13 does not write an insurance floor into the salon license the way some states in this series do, so the insurance stack for a South Carolina salon is set by risk and by contract rather than by the board. Professional liability is the core policy for a room built on chemical services, hot tools and wet floors around shampoo bowls, and it is the coverage a booth renter structure has to think hardest about, because the salon's policy, the renter's own policy and the salon license's inspection record describe overlapping people.

General liability for the premises and property coverage for equipment, furniture and the retail stock complete the standard stack. Landlords, and suite landlords in particular, routinely name their own limits and additional insured requirements in the lease, and those contract numbers, not a statute, are the figures to satisfy. Keep the certificates filed with the licenses they sit beside, so an inspector, a landlord or a new manager can see the whole compliance picture in one folder.

Your South Carolina renewal calendar

Official sources

• Board of Cosmetology: practitioner, salon and booth renter licensing
• Board of Cosmetology: examination information, training hours and passing scores
• South Carolina Code Title 40 Chapter 13: cosmetology hours, licenses and continuing education
• Board of Cosmetology: salon application package, fees and the Self-Inspection Report
• Board of Cosmetology: FAQ on endorsement and out of state licensure
• Secretary of State: business entities FAQ, including the trade name and licensing answers
• Department of Revenue: the retail license, $50 per location
• Department of Employment and Workforce: 2026 tax rates and the $14,000 wage base
• South Carolina Code Title 6 Chapter 1: business license tax standardization, Act 176

South Carolina hair salon FAQ