What South Carolina’s 2026 Liquor Liability Law Changed

South Carolina rewrote its liquor liability law effective 1 January 2026. If you were hurt by a drunk driver in South Carolina, the rules governing what a bar or restaurant owes you are not the rules that applied a year ago — and which set applies to your case depends on when you were hurt.

2025 Act No. 42 (H.3430) passed the House 105–0 and the Senate 45–0 and was signed on 12 May 2025. It runs to eleven sections and touches joint and several liability, licensee insurance, alcohol sales, and server training. This page covers the parts that affect an injured person’s claim.

The date is the first question, not the last

Section 11 of the Act is unusually specific. It provides that the Act “takes effect January 1, 2026, and applies only to causes of action or claims arising or accruing after January 1, 2026, and applies to all policies issued after that date.”

So the old law did not disappear. The South Carolina Code now publishes two versions of S.C. Code § 15-38-15 side by side, one marked effective until 1 January 2026 and one effective from that date. Which governs a particular claim turns on when the cause of action arose or accrued, which is a question about the accident rather than about the statute. If your injury is anywhere near that boundary, it is worth asking early.

What changed: the exception in § 15-38-15

South Carolina limits joint and several liability. Under subsection (A), it “does not apply to any defendant whose conduct is determined to be less than fifty percent of the total fault” — that defendant pays only its own share. That threshold did not change. A defendant at exactly fifty percent remains on the joint-liability side under both versions.

What changed is subsection (F), the carve-out that put certain defendants outside that limit entirely.

Alcohol and gross negligence came out. That is the headline, and read alone it sounds like a straightforward loss for injured people. It is not the whole picture, because the Act put a different alcohol rule back in a different place.

The new rule: § 61-2-147

The Act created S.C. Code § 61-2-147, which applies “notwithstanding the provisions of Section 15-38-15.” Two things happen under it.

The drunk driver goes on the verdict form. A tortfeasor charged under § 56-5-2930 (DUI), § 56-5-2933 (unlawful alcohol concentration) or § 56-5-2945 (felony DUI) is placed on the jury verdict form on the defendant’s motion, if that motion is made within 180 days of the action commencing or later for good cause. The plaintiff may instead add that person as a party defendant, with the amended pleading relating back to the start of the case. A settling tortfeasor goes on the form regardless of the deadline.

And where both are found liable, the establishment’s exposure is fixed by statute. The section provides that if a verdict is rendered against both a licensee and a defendant charged under one of those three sections, “the licensee is jointly and severally liable for fifty percent of the plaintiff’s actual damages.”

Note the condition. This is not a flat rule that bars are liable for half of everything. It applies where a verdict comes back against the establishment and a driver charged under one of the named DUI provisions. Outside that pattern, the ordinary apportionment rules do the work.

A single word in the sales prohibition

S.C. Code § 61-6-2220 has long prohibited a licensed establishment from selling alcohol to a person “in an intoxicated condition.” The Act inserted one word: the establishment may not knowingly sell to a person in that condition.

One word, and it is easy to miss in a summary of an eleven-section act. It adds a knowledge element to the statutory prohibition — which matters because that prohibition is the hook a dram-shop claim hangs on.

What licensees now have to carry, and do

Insurance. S.C. Code § 61-2-145 already required on-premises licensees open after 5:00 p.m. to carry at least $1,000,000 in liquor liability cover. From 2026 that figure is expressed as an annual aggregate, a policy must provide per-occurrence coverage of at least fifty percent of the aggregate, and a licensee qualifying under a liquor liability risk mitigation programme is treated differently.

The per-occurrence floor is the practical detail. An annual aggregate can be eroded by earlier claims; a stated per-occurrence minimum is what a single catastrophic case actually reaches.

Server training. The Act added a new Chapter 3 to Title 61. Alcohol servers and managers must complete approved training and hold a certificate, and where someone is hired without one, the licensee must provide the training within thirty calendar days.

What Act 42 did not do

Three corrections, because each is already circulating.

It did not abolish dram-shop liability. Establishments that serve visibly intoxicated patrons can still be liable. The Act changed how a licensee’s share is calculated, not whether one exists.

It did not change South Carolina’s comparative negligence rule. The bar on recovery for a plaintiff who is more than half at fault is untouched, as is the fifty-percent threshold in § 15-38-15(A). When Georgia passed its own tort reform in 2025, the most common error in reporting was that the bill had changed that state’s comparative negligence rule — it had not, and the same error will attach itself to this Act.

It is not simply good or bad for injured people. One route to full joint liability closed and a narrower, more specific one opened. Anyone who tells you the net effect across all cases is guessing; it depends on the facts, the defendants, and the date.

What this page does not tell you

It does not tell you which version of the law governs your claim. That turns on when your cause of action arose or accrued, and it is the first thing to establish rather than something to assume from a publication date.

It also does not cover every section of the Act. Sections dealing with beer and wine permits, insurance rating, and captive insurers are outside what an injured person’s claim usually turns on, and are not summarised here rather than summarised loosely.

Sources

Every statement above comes from the enrolled text of the Act or the codified sections, both published by the South Carolina General Assembly: the bill record for H.3430, the two versions of § 15-38-15, and § 61-2-147 and § 61-2-145 as enacted. No secondary summary was used.

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About the Author

Eric Roden

Founding Partner, CEO State Bar of Georgia | Georgia Court of Appeals | Supreme Court of Georgia

Eric Roden has represented injury victims from the outset of his career and has never advocated on behalf of insurance companies. He focuses on wrongful death, automobile accidents, nursing home negligence, and workers’ compensation law. In 2013, he became a founding partner of Roden Law, dedicated to providing advocacy for injured clients. Education J.D., University […]

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