Dental practices in South Carolina by county

There were 1,748 offices of dentists with paid employees in South Carolina in 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP), NAICS code 621210. Those offices reported 14,540 employees in the March pay period and $931.3 million in annual payroll, which works out to about 8.3 people per office and roughly $64,050 in payroll per employee.

Scaled to the Census Bureau's Vintage 2024 population estimate of 5,478,831 residents, the state has 3.19 dental offices per 10,000 people. Summing the same code across every U.S. county gives 134,662 offices for 340.1 million residents, or 3.96 per 10,000. South Carolina has 1.61 percent of the U.S. population but 1.30 percent of its employer dental offices.

CBP counts establishments, meaning physical locations, not dentists. A group practice with three locations counts three times, and a solo dentist with no employees is not counted at all. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook reports 161,400 dentist jobs nationally in 2025 and says offices of dentists employ 78 percent of them, so the establishment count is a good proxy for where patients can actually book care.

Charleston County leads the state with 5.31 dental offices per 10,000 residents, followed by York, Beaufort, Georgetown, Greenville and Lexington. Those six are the only counties at or above the U.S. rate. In raw counts, Greenville (235) and Charleston (229) are nearly tied, and the five largest counties by office count hold 889 offices, 50.9 percent of the state total.

A high rate means patients in that county have more choices within a short drive, so a practice there competes on visibility, reviews, convenience and how fast it answers a new-patient inquiry. A low rate can mean patients drive to a neighboring county, which is common in the Midlands and the Pee Dee where county lines cut across commuting patterns.

The fastest-growing counties have the fewest dental offices per resident. Six counties grew 10 percent or more between the April 2020 estimates base and July 2024: Jasper, Horry, Lancaster, Berkeley, Edgefield and Spartanburg. Together they added 164,370 residents, yet they average 2.28 dental offices per 10,000 people, about 29 percent below the state rate.

Horry County is the clearest case. It grew 17.8 percent to 413,391 residents and has 95 dental offices, a rate of 2.30. Berkeley grew 15.0 percent and sits at 2.01. Jasper, the fastest-growing county in the state at 23.7 percent, has 7 offices for 35,618 people. New residents in these counties are choosing a dentist for the first time, often from a search on their phone, which makes them reachable for any practice that shows up well in local results.

• Seven counties have no published dental office count: Abbeville, Allendale, Calhoun, Fairfield, Lee, McCormick and Union. Together they are home to 119,395 people.
• CBP only publishes a county cell with three or more establishments, so these counties have zero, one or two employer dental offices.
• Marlboro (1.18), Cherokee (1.21), Chester (1.24) and Darlington (1.28) have the lowest published rates.

South Carolina dental offices are larger than the U.S. average. Only 28.8 percent of the state's offices have fewer than 5 employees, compared with 37.1 percent nationally. The middle sizes carry the difference: 36.6 percent of South Carolina offices have 5 to 9 employees (34.8 percent nationally) and 27.3 percent have 10 to 19 (21.3 percent nationally).

A 10 to 19 person office usually means multiple chairs, hygienists and a front desk handling a steady flow of calls, confirmations and insurance questions. At that size, the systems behind scheduling and patient communication matter as much as the clinical team, because missed calls and unfilled hygiene slots add up quickly.

Use county density to decide where to compete harder and where to expand. The BLS projects dentist employment to grow 6 percent from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all occupations, and South Carolina's population grew 7.0 percent from 2020 to 2024, so demand is rising faster than office counts in several counties.

Density also changes what a good marketing budget buys. In a county with five offices per 10,000 people, paid search and review generation are defending share against nearby practices that patients can reach in minutes. In a county with two, the same spend is more often reaching people who have not picked a dentist yet, and the main job is being easy to find and easy to book.

• In dense counties (Charleston, York, Beaufort, Greenville, Lexington), competition is for attention. Review volume, a fast and easy online booking path and same-day response to new-patient inquiries set practices apart.
• In fast-growing, thinner counties (Horry, Berkeley, Lancaster, Jasper), new residents are choosing a dentist for the first time. A clear service page for each town you serve and an accurate Google Business Profile get you in front of them.
• If you are planning a second location, compare your target county's rate with 3.19 (state) and 3.96 (U.S.) and look at the growth column, not just the raw count.
• Counties with no published count may still have one or two offices. Check the map before assuming there is no competition.

A county count is the starting point for a growth plan, not the plan itself. Monvell's Consulting and Marketing teams pair this kind of competitive picture with a practice's own booking and call data to decide which markets to target and what to fix first.

Dataset: U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns 2023, county file (cbp23co.txt), NAICS 621210 (offices of dentists). CBP covers establishments with paid employees; employment is for the pay period including March 12 and payroll is annual, in thousands of dollars. CBP 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. The U.S. population is the sum of the 50 states and the District of Columbia (340,110,988).

Method: we filtered CBP to South Carolina (state FIPS 45), summed establishments, employment and payroll per county, joined population by county FIPS and computed establishments per 10,000 residents. The U.S. rate sums the same NAICS code across all county records, including statewide records not assigned to a county. Size shares sum the published employment size class columns; cells marked N are not counted, which is why a small share is not allocated.

Limits: CBP excludes dentists with no employees, counts locations rather than practices, and applies noise to employment and payroll (flags G, H and J mean the value changed by less than 2 percent, 2 to 5 percent, or 5 percent or more). Counties with fewer than three establishments are not published. The Census Bureau has since released Vintage 2025 population estimates; we used Vintage 2024 to stay closer to the 2023 business data.