Safest Counties in South Carolina is based on 2024 data.
South Carolina’s three safest counties for 2024 are Edgefield, Saluda, and McCormick — all of them small, rural, and clustered on the state’s western border with Georgia. The ranking comes from the State Law Enforcement Division’s annual Crime in South Carolina report, released in December 2025, which measures violent crime offenses per 10,000 residents [SLED, 2025].
Edgefield finished first with a rate of 5.77, holding a position it has occupied for several years running. Saluda came in second at 19.54, and McCormick third at 22.04 [SLED, 2025]. The 2024 ordering shifted slightly from the previous year, when Edgefield, McCormick, and Abbeville held the top three slots. Saluda moved up; Abbeville dropped off.
For Horry County readers, the more useful question is not which counties top the list but why those counties — and why a coastal county of 413,000 residents and 20 million annual visitors is not in the conversation.
Understanding the Safest Counties in South Carolina
## The Top 3 — and How They Earned It
**Edgefield County** sits on the Georgia border in the outer ring of the Aiken-Augusta metro area, with a population of roughly 29,500 [U.S. Census, 2024]. The county is rural and low-density, with a poverty rate under 20 percent and a population that is more than 20 percent age 65 or older. The county is 59 percent white and 31 percent Black, and the median household profile leans older and more settled than the state average [U.S. Census, 2024].
Its claim to historical fame is supplying multiple South Carolina governors over the state’s history. It also hosts the Forks Area Trail System, a mountain-biking draw that brings day-trippers without producing the seasonal density that reshapes a county. The county’s claim to safety is structural: few people, few visitors, low density, and a stable demographic profile. The 5.77 rate is not a single-year fluke. Edgefield has held the lowest violent crime rate in South Carolina for multiple years running [SLED, 2025].
**Saluda County**, with about 20,000 residents, lies in the Midlands southwest of Columbia, adjacent to the western shore of Lake Murray. It is one of South Carolina’s leading peach-producing counties, anchored more by orchard rows than by retail strips. No major interstate corridor cuts through it, which keeps both transient traffic and the offense patterns that follow interstate exits to a minimum. Saluda already held the state’s lowest property crime rate in 2023 at 65.89 per 10,000 residents; in 2024 it added the second-lowest violent crime rate to that profile [SLED, 2025]. The county is roughly 180 miles and three hours’ drive west of Myrtle Beach.
**McCormick County** is South Carolina’s second-least-populous county, with roughly 10,400 residents along Lake Thurmond — the J. Strom Thurmond Reservoir — on the Georgia line. A large share of the county sits inside the Sumter National Forest, and much of its population clusters in Savannah Lakes Village, a 4,000-acre lakefront community oriented toward retirees, with two championship golf courses. The county sits roughly 230 miles and four hours’ drive west of Horry County. Small, older, lakefront, and quiet describes the place. So do its numbers.
The pattern is clean. The safest places in South Carolina are small, western, rural, and not on any tourist’s itinerary. They are not safe because their sheriffs are smarter. They are safe because there are fewer people, fewer visitors, and fewer of the conditions that produce violent crime in the first place.
## How the Numbers Work
The SLED ranking measures four offense categories: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Those are summed, then divided by the resident population and expressed per 10,000 people [SLED, 2025]. Property crime — burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft — is ranked separately.
The agency compiled the report from 288 active South Carolina law enforcement agencies, but only 204 of them — 71 percent — reported all 12 months of 2024 data [SLED, 2025]. That is a meaningful gap, and it is worth carrying in mind through any ranking conclusion.
Two other features of the methodology matter. The first is the denominator: SLED uses resident population only, with no adjustment for visitors, commuters, or seasonal population. The second is volatility. In a county of 10,000 people, a single bad incident can swing the rate sharply year to year. The bigger the county, the more stable the rate.
That math frames everything that follows.
## Where Horry County Stands
Horry County’s resident population in 2024 was 413,391 [SLED, 2025, via WBTW]. The county’s violent crime rate ran at roughly 11.9 offenses per 10,000 residents — about twice the state average and roughly 20 times Edgefield’s rate [FBI Crime Data Explorer, 2024]. That figure is sourced to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer rather than the SLED summary because the exact per-10,000 SLED figure for Horry did not appear in the public press release.
Horry is not in the bottom five. Dillon, Orangeburg, Marlboro, Lee, and Marion hold those positions [SLED, 2025]. But Horry sits in the top five statewide for raw offense volume in aggravated assault and robbery. Aggravated assault arrests in the county totaled 460 in 2024, down slightly from 469 the year before. Murder arrests rose from 15 to 16 [SLED, 2025].
Then comes the denominator problem. SLED ranks Horry against a resident population of 413,000. The county hosts roughly 20 million annual visitors, and Grand Strand summer daily population routinely exceeds 600,000 to 700,000 once tourists are counted [Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce, via SLED data context]. Crimes committed by or against visitors land in Horry’s numerator. None of those visitors land in Horry’s denominator. The rate per resident is, mathematically, inflated against counties without tourism.
There is one more fact that complicates the easy narrative. Horry County’s property crime rate ran at roughly 1.59 offenses per 10,000 residents in 2024 — about 2.9 percent below the national average [FBI Crime Data Explorer, 2024]. The gap between Horry and the safest counties shows up in violent crime per resident, not in theft. That distinction matters for anyone reading the headline and reaching for a real estate listing.
## What “Safest” Doesn’t Measure
A violent crime per 10,000 ranking is one slice of safety. It is not the only one, and on several other measures Horry County does well and the western counties do not.
Traffic fatalities are the largest gap. Horry consistently ranks among the worst counties in South Carolina for traffic deaths, driven by congested coastal corridors, summer tourism volume, and aging infrastructure. The SLED report does not capture any of that.
Natural disaster exposure is the second gap. Horry sits in the Atlantic hurricane corridor. Edgefield, Saluda, and McCormick do not. A “safe” county on paper that loses power, water, and roads to a major storm has its own definition of risk.
Healthcare access, environmental exposure, and emergency response times also fall outside the SLED measure. Grand Strand residents have hospital access most rural counties cannot match. McCormick County’s 10,400 residents do not have a Level I trauma center down the road.
The 71 percent reporting rate is the final caveat. Any ranking built on partial data carries an asterisk. Definitions, denominators, and reporting completeness all shape what “safest” means.
## The Question for Horry
The story under the numbers is not that Horry County’s law enforcement agencies are doing anything wrong. The Horry County Sheriff’s Office and the municipal departments along the Grand Strand are policing a county that absorbs a city’s worth of tourists every summer weekend. The safest counties in South Carolina are safe in part because nothing is happening in them. That is the trade-off most Horry residents — or their parents, or grandparents — chose when they moved to the coast.
The accountability question is narrower and more useful. Are Horry County’s law enforcement agencies — sheriff’s deputies, Myrtle Beach police, North Myrtle Beach police, Conway police, Surfside Beach police — staffed and funded for the load they actually carry? Not for 413,000 residents. For 413,000 residents plus 20 million visitors. Plus the summer days when the functional population approaches 700,000.
That is a budget question. It is a county council question. It is a question worth asking before the next SLED report lands.
## Looking Ahead
The next Crime in South Carolina report will arrive in December 2026, covering calendar year 2025. The numbers worth watching are not whether Edgefield holds the top spot — it likely will — but whether Horry’s aggravated assault and robbery counts rise, hold, or fall, and whether they move with population growth or against it.
For residents, the path is not a move 220 miles west. It is a clearer-eyed conversation with elected officials about whether the agencies asked to police a 700,000-person summer footprint have the staffing, the equipment, and the budget to do it. That conversation belongs in front of Horry County Council, not in a SLED press release.
## Further Reading
Safest Counties in South Carolina – SLED 2024 Crime in South Carolina annual report — https://www.sled.sc.gov/about/updates/sled-2024-crime-south-carolina-annual-report-murder-and-aggravated-assault-down-pre-pandemic-levels
Safest Counties in South Carolina – SLED SC Crime Data portal —https://www.sled.sc.gov/sc-crime-data
Safest Counties in South Carolina – WBTW — Violent crime in South Carolina dips in 2024 — https://www.wbtw.com/news/state-regional-news/violent-crime-in-south-carolina-dips-in-2024-sled-report-shows-3-pee-dee-counties-near-top/
Safest Counties in South Carolina – WMBF News — Annual crime report rankings for Grand Strand and Pee Dee counties — https://www.wmbfnews.com/2025/12/05/annual-crime-report-shows-where-grand-strand-pee-dee-counties-rank/
Safest Counties in South Carolina – WRDW — Crime in South Carolina down for fourth year in a row — https://www.wrdw.com/2025/12/05/crime-south-carolina-plummets-4th-year-row/
Safest Counties in South Carolina – Yahoo News / The State — Counties in SC with the highest and lowest violent crime — https://www.yahoo.com/news/counties-sc-highest-lowest-violent-190441512.html
Safest Counties in South Carolina – Axelrod & Associates — SLED summary and SC crime rate by city — https://www.gotaxelrod.com/blog/south-carolina-crime-rate-by-city/
Safest Counties in South Carolina – SafeWise — SC Safest Cities 2026 — https://www.safewise.com/blog/safest-cities-south-carolina/
Safest Counties in South Carolina – FBI Crime Data Explorer — https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/
Safest Counties in South Carolina – Crime Explorer — Horry County profile — https://crimeexplorer.com/south-carolina/county/horry/
Safest Counties in South Carolina – U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts — https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/
