What marketing and web roles pay in South Carolina

The median marketing manager in South Carolina earns $143,290 a year, and the mean is $162,650, based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) estimates for May 2025. Half of the 3,760 marketing managers counted in the state earn more than the median and half earn less. The middle 50% fall between $105,170 and $192,520.

That is about 86% of the national median of $166,790. South Carolina is cheaper than the national average for every marketing and web role we looked at, but the discount is smaller than many expect. For a service business weighing a senior marketing hire, the realistic budget for salary alone starts well above $100,000.

The table below compares annual median wages in South Carolina with the national median for seven roles a service business is likely to consider. The last column shows the South Carolina median as a share of the U.S. median.

Marketing specialists and graphic designers are the closest to national pay, at 88% and 91%. Web and digital interface designers (people who design websites and app screens) show the widest gap, at 78%. Public relations managers are also well below the national figure, partly because the state has only about 650 of them, so the pay mix is driven by a small number of employers.

A marketing specialist in South Carolina earns a median of $69,440 a year, and a web developer earns a median of $78,190, according to BLS. These are the two roles a service business most often hires first when it brings marketing or website work in-house.

The spread inside each role is wide. For marketing specialists, the 10th percentile is $39,950 and the 90th percentile is $153,090. That range covers everything from a coordinator who schedules social posts to an analyst who runs paid search budgets and attribution. Web developers range from $52,850 at the 10th percentile to $125,210 at the 90th.

When you write a job description, the title alone will not tell a candidate where you sit on that range. A dental group that wants someone to manage Google Business Profile updates, email campaigns and review requests is hiring near the 25th percentile ($51,410 for specialists). A law firm that wants someone to run paid search, track cost per signed case and report to partners is hiring closer to the 75th ($100,020).

Charleston, Greenville and Columbia pay similar medians for marketing roles, and the smaller metros and rural areas pay less. The table shows the annual median for three common roles in South Carolina metro areas, as published by BLS for May 2025.

Some cells are blank because BLS does not publish an estimate when the sample is too small or the figure would not meet its reliability standards. Columbia, for example, has no published web developer estimate, and Greenville has employment but no wage figure for web and digital interface designers. Treat estimates for roles with fewer than 100 workers in a metro as rough.

• Charlotte pays more than any South Carolina metro for marketing specialists ($82,930 median). Businesses in York and Lancaster counties compete with that market for the same people.
• Myrtle Beach has the lowest specialist median among the larger metros ($57,840), which fits a labor market built around hospitality and seasonal work.
• In the nonmetropolitan parts of the state, BLS reports marketing specialist medians from $53,460 (southern nonmetro area) to $68,620 (northwestern nonmetro area).

South Carolina has fewer marketing and web workers than its overall job count would predict. BLS measures this with a location quotient: a value of 1.0 means a role makes up the same share of jobs in the state as it does nationally, and anything below 1.0 means it is less common.

For May 2025, the state's location quotients are 0.89 for marketing specialists, 0.66 for graphic designers, 0.64 for marketing managers, 0.68 for web developers and 0.48 for web and digital interface designers. North Carolina, by comparison, sits at 1.07 for specialists and 0.91 for web developers.

A thin local talent pool affects hiring more than pay does. A smaller pool means longer searches, fewer candidates with the exact skills you need, and more competition with larger employers in health systems, banks and manufacturers for the same people. It also means a single hire often has to cover several jobs: content, ads, the website and reporting.

Salary is roughly 70% of what a private employer spends on an employee. The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026 found private industry compensation averaged $46.89 per hour worked, of which wages and salaries were $32.82 (70.0%) and benefits were $14.07 (30.0%).

If you apply that national average split to South Carolina medians, the rough total cost of one employee is about $99,200 for a marketing specialist, $111,700 for a web developer and $204,700 for a marketing manager. This is our own illustrative calculation. Your actual benefits, payroll taxes and paid leave will differ, and it does not include software, ad spend, training or management time.

• Marketing specialist: $69,440 median salary, about $99,200 total at a 70% wage share
• Web developer: $78,190 median salary, about $111,700 total
• Graphic designer: $57,170 median salary, about $81,700 total
• Marketing manager: $143,290 median salary, about $204,700 total

Use the wage data to price the decision, then decide based on what the work needs. A full-time hire makes sense when the work is steady, needs daily judgment inside the business, and fits one person's skills. A medical practice with four locations that publishes weekly content and runs ongoing patient campaigns may keep a specialist busy all year.

Outside help makes sense when the work spans several skill sets (design, development, paid media, analytics) that no single salary covers, or when the volume rises and falls. A property management company that needs a new website, a review process and lead tracking set up once, then maintained, may not need a full-time developer after launch.

Many service companies end up with a mix: one internal coordinator who knows the business and the customers, plus outside specialists for build work and technical tasks. Monvell's Consulting and Marketing teams can help you map which tasks belong in-house and which are cheaper to buy, using numbers like these as the baseline.

• List the marketing and web tasks you need in the next 12 months and estimate hours for each.
• Match each task to a role in the table above and note its South Carolina median.
• Multiply salary by about 1.4 (the inverse of the 70% wage share) for a rough total cost.
• Compare that against outside quotes for the same scope, including setup and ongoing maintenance.
• Check whether one person could realistically do every task on the list at the level you need.

Dataset: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, released in 2026. We downloaded the state file (oesm25st), the metropolitan and nonmetropolitan area file (oesm25ma) and the national file (oesm25nat) from the BLS OEWS tables page and filtered them in Python.

Occupations (SOC 2018 codes): 11-2021 marketing managers, 11-2032 public relations managers, 13-1161 market research analysts and marketing specialists, 15-1254 web developers, 15-1255 web and digital interface designers, 27-1024 graphic designers, 27-3031 public relations specialists. We used cross-industry estimates for all ownerships.

Method: we report BLS medians and percentiles as published, and computed the South Carolina median as a percentage of the U.S. median. Total cost figures divide the median wage by 0.70, the wage share of private industry compensation in the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026.

Limits: OEWS covers wage and salary workers only and excludes the self-employed, so freelancers and agency owners are not in these counts. Metro estimates for small occupations have larger errors, and BLS withholds some estimates (marked * or ** in its files). The 70% wage share is a national private-industry average, not a South Carolina or occupation-specific figure. The plan for this article named May 2024 data; we used May 2025 because it is the latest release.