Accounting and tax firms in South Carolina by county

South Carolina had 1,739 accounting firms with paid employees in 2023, counting four Census industry codes together: offices of certified public accountants (NAICS 541211), tax preparation services (541213), payroll services (541214) and other accounting services, which includes bookkeeping (541219). The figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP).

Together these offices reported 11,677 employees in the March pay period and $797.6 million in annual payroll. Against the Vintage 2024 population estimate of 5,478,831, the state has 3.17 accounting offices per 10,000 residents, or one for every 3,151 people. Across all U.S. counties the same codes total 132,363 offices, a rate of 3.89 and one office for every 2,570 people.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook reports 1,595,200 accountant and auditor jobs nationally in 2025, a median pay of $83,680 in May 2025, and projected employment growth of 5 percent from 2025 to 2035. Many of those jobs sit inside other companies, so the office counts here measure the firms that sell accounting services to the public.

South Carolina's accounting market leans more toward tax preparation than the U.S. as a whole. The state has 467 tax preparation offices and 652 CPA offices, or 72 tax preparers for every 100 CPA offices. Nationally the ratio is 51 per 100. Tax preparation offices make up 26.9 percent of the state's accounting offices, compared with 20.7 percent nationally.

The per-resident rates tell the same story. South Carolina has 0.85 tax preparation offices per 10,000 people, slightly above the U.S. rate of 0.81. CPA offices (1.19 versus 1.58) and other accounting and bookkeeping offices (1.00 versus 1.36) are both well below the national rate. Payroll services offices are few (71) but large: they reported 2,909 employees and $305.9 million in payroll, more than a third of the combined total.

• Payroll per employee differs sharply by type: about $76,460 at CPA offices, $105,170 at payroll services, $47,410 at other accounting offices and $18,730 at tax preparation offices.
• The tax preparation figure reflects seasonal and part-time staff. CBP measures employment in mid-March, the height of filing season, while payroll covers the full year.

Georgetown County has the densest accounting market in the state, with 39 offices for 66,035 residents (5.91 per 10,000). Charleston, Greenville, Beaufort and Horry follow, and those five are the only counties at or above the U.S. rate. By count, Greenville leads with 259 offices, ahead of Charleston (215), Horry (164), Richland (163) and Lexington (114). Those five counties hold 52.6 percent of the state's accounting offices.

Greenville's total is driven by CPA offices (117), the most of any county, while Horry, Richland and Aiken have an unusually high share of tax preparation offices: 45 of Horry's 164 offices and 23 of Aiken's 49 are tax preparers. The mix matters as much as the total. A county full of tax preparers competes on price and convenience in a short season, while a county with many CPA offices competes on expertise and year-round relationships.

Ten counties have no published accounting office count: Abbeville, Allendale, Calhoun, Clarendon, Edgefield, Lee, McCormick, Marlboro, Saluda and Williamsburg, home to 207,648 people combined. Because CBP only publishes a cell with three or more establishments, each of these counties has zero, one or two offices in each of the four codes, so a few firms may still operate there.

Growth counties are thin too. The six counties that grew 10 percent or more from 2020 to 2024 average 2.85 offices per 10,000 residents. Lancaster (2.51), Berkeley (2.46), Spartanburg (2.27) and Jasper (2.25) are all well under the state rate, and Edgefield, which grew 14.9 percent, has no published count. Horry is the exception at 3.97. Laurens (0.85) and Colleton (1.02) have the lowest published rates.

The scarce counties are small and mostly rural, and five of the ten lost population from 2020 to 2024, so low supply there often reflects low demand. The more useful signal is a county that is both growing and thin, such as Lancaster or Jasper, where new households and new small businesses arrive faster than new accounting offices open.

Treat the county rates as a map of where clients have fewer local options and where they have many. Rising population in the Upstate and the Lowcountry suburbs means new households and new small businesses that need a tax preparer, a bookkeeper or a CPA, and the supply of offices has not kept pace in several of those counties.

• Firms in Greenville, Charleston or Georgetown compete with dozens of nearby offices. Specialization (by industry, life stage or service) and a clear description of who you serve on your website separate you faster than discounts.
• Firms near Lancaster, Berkeley, Spartanburg or Jasper can win new residents by being easy to find for the specific service they search for, such as small business bookkeeping or individual tax returns.
• Tax preparation offices compete in a short, intense season. Online booking, automated reminders and document collection before the March peak protect capacity when every hour counts.
• CPA firms adding advisory or bookkeeping services can use the gap between South Carolina and U.S. rates (1.00 versus 1.36 for other accounting services) as a sign of room in the market.

Office counts are one input to a growth plan; client mix, capacity and seasonality are the others. Monvell's Consulting and Operations teams help accounting firms decide where to grow and set up the intake, scheduling and document workflows that keep tax season under control.

Dataset: U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns 2023, county file (cbp23co.txt), NAICS 541211, 541213, 541214 and 541219, each pulled separately and then summed. CBP covers establishments with paid employees; data from 2017 to 2023 use 2017 NAICS codes.

Population: Census Bureau Vintage 2024 county estimates (co-est2024-alldata.csv), POPESTIMATE2024. Growth is POPESTIMATE2024 divided by ESTIMATESBASE2020, minus one. U.S. population is the sum of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Method: for each county we summed establishments, employment and payroll across the four codes, joined population by county FIPS and computed offices per 10,000 residents. The state total of 1,739 includes 9 offices that CBP assigns to South Carolina but not to a specific county. U.S. rates sum the same codes across every county record. Size shares (68.4 percent of SC offices have fewer than five employees, versus 68.5 percent nationally) sum the published size class columns; 11.8 percent of SC offices fall in suppressed cells.

Limits: CBP excludes self-employed preparers and bookkeepers with no employees, who are a large part of this industry. Because each code is suppressed separately below three establishments, county totals for small counties are undercounts. Employment and payroll carry disclosure noise, and Vintage 2025 population estimates are now available; we used Vintage 2024 to stay closer to the 2023 business data.