Off-Grid Living in Spartanburg County, South Carolina

I'll be upfront: Spartanburg County is a bit more tangled than most counties I research, because it doesn't run one countywide zoning ordinance. Depending on where your parcel sits, you're under either the Performance Zoning Ordinance (PZO) in the Southwest Planning Area or the Unified Land Management Ordinance (ULMO) everywhere else, and if you're inside city limits (like the City of Spartanburg), the municipality has its own separate zoning ordinance entirely. That means the very first thing I'd tell anyone eyeing off-grid land here is: call the Spartanburg County Planning & Development Department and find out which ordinance actually governs your specific parcel before you assume anything.

Raw land isn't automatically exempt from zoning in unincorporated Spartanburg County. The Planning & Development Department reviews and permits zoning uses there. And if there's a recorded restrictive covenant on the property, the county explicitly won't interpret it for you, that's a job for a real estate attorney, title abstractor, or a trip to the Register of Deeds.

On dwellings: the ULMO has a dedicated section covering manufactured homes, travel trailers, and RVs, addressing use, location, setup, and habitability. I found unofficial secondary sources suggesting the county doesn't allow tiny homes on wheels as permanent residences but does allow code-built tiny homes on permanent foundations, but I couldn't confirm this on an official county page, so treat it as a lead to verify, not gospel. Manufactured homes must be installed and inspected per county and state code, plus the IRC and NEC. And if you're thinking of putting an off-grid cabin as a second structure on a lot with an existing house, know that second residential structures require prior county approval before an address or building permit can even be issued.

Building itself is permitted, but Spartanburg County's Building Codes Department enforces a full stack of adopted state codes (2021 IBC, IRC, IMC, NEC, and more), and permitting runs through the county's online Citizen Self Service portal.

Septic is the standard South Carolina story: SCDES (formerly DHEC) approval under its statewide onsite wastewater regulation is required before the county will issue a building permit, and applications get routed through the county Building Codes office or SCDES directly. I didn't find any county-specific composting toilet rule, so it's the state septic framework by default.

Greywater and rainwater both fall back to state rules, and honestly the state rules on rainwater harvesting are themselves unclear, no caps or registration requirements were found anywhere. Wells are entirely a state matter under SCDES's residential well regulations, with no added county layer that I could find.

Bottom line on going fully off-grid here: no law forces a grid hookup, but you still need county building and zoning sign-off, plus SCDES septic and well permits, before you can legally live there.