Permits ·
Do You Need a Permit for a Deck or an Addition in Conway and Horry County?
The short answer is almost always yes. The longer answer is about what the county wants to see, in what order, and why skipping it becomes expensive at exactly the wrong moment.
Image described: A new room addition framed onto the side of an existing coastal home
We run permitting in house for every job we do, so this is the question we answer more than any other. Here is what we tell people.
Decks
A deck attached to your house, or raised above a certain height, generally requires a permit in Horry County and in the City of Conway. Some very low, freestanding, ground level platforms fall outside it. The exact thresholds depend on whether you are inside city limits or in the unincorporated county, and they do get revised.
We pull the permit either way, because the cost of pulling it is small and the cost of not having it is not.
Additions
Always. Any addition that changes the footprint or adds conditioned space needs a permit, and in almost every case it needs engineered plans to get one.
It is also not the first step. The order matters, and getting it wrong is what makes additions stall.
The order the county actually wants
HOA approval first, if your neighborhood has one, because some HOAs take weeks and the permit application will want to know.
Then a survey, so everyone knows where your property lines and setbacks are. This is what determines whether the addition can legally go where you want it.
Then architectural drawings. Then engineered plans, stamped, because the county will not approve structural work without them.
Then the permit application with all of that attached. Then county review. Then, and only then, a start date.
That is nine steps and we lay all of them out on our page for homeowners, because it is better to see the list at the start than discover it one step at a time.
What it costs you to skip it
Three things, and they arrive later rather than sooner.
When you sell. Unpermitted square footage does not count as living space on an appraisal, and buyers' agents look. We have seen closings delayed while somebody tries to permit a sunroom retroactively.
When you claim. An insurer can decline a claim on unpermitted structural work. That is the one that actually hurts.
When the county notices. Stop work orders, fines, and in a bad case removing what was built.
How long does it take?
Honestly, it varies more than anything else in the process, because county review time is not something we control. What we can control is that the application goes in complete the first time, with the survey, the drawings and the engineering attached, because an incomplete application goes to the back of the queue.
Ask for the permit position in writing
It is a fair thing to ask and not a rude one, and anyone confident about it will write it down. If the answer is that no permit is required, that is worth having on paper either way, because the inspection record follows the house rather than the contractor.
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