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Golf Carts Share Grand Strand Roads With 4,000-Pound Cars. The Law Has Rules for Both.
Nowhere in South Carolina do golf carts meet traffic like the Grand Strand, where beach neighborhoods, campgrounds, and rental fleets put carts on public roads all season.
State law allows it, within strict limits: a permit, a licensed driver, daylight hours, slow roads, and a four-mile radius.
When a crash happens anyway, the cart's occupants have no doors, no airbags, and no crumple zone, and the injuries show it.
Golf cart crashes sit at the intersection of traffic law, insurance law, and rental agreements, and the injured person's recovery depends on all three.
Hurt in a cart crash, or hit by one? Free case review: (888) 713-6653.
SC Golf Cart Law at a Glance (§ 56-2-90)
- Permit, registration, and proof of liability insurance required ($5 DMV fee)
- Driver must be 16+ with a valid license
- Daylight hours only, unless a municipality allows lighted nighttime use
- Roads posted 35 mph or less, within 4 miles of the registered address
- Passengers under 12 must wear a fastened seat belt
The Rules for Driving a Golf Cart on South Carolina Roads
The current rules live in S.C. Code § 56-2-90, which the legislature rewrote in 2025 (the old § 56-2-105 citation you may find elsewhere is out of date):[1]
| Requirement | The Rule |
|---|---|
| Permit & registration | DMV permit decal and registration certificate: proof of ownership, proof of liability insurance, $5 fee. Decal renews every five years or on an address change. |
| Driver | At least 16 years old with a valid driver's license, carrying the license, registration, and proof of insurance. |
| Where | Roads posted 35 mph or less, within four miles of the registered address. Carts may cross faster roads at intersections. |
| When | Daylight hours by default. Municipalities may allow nighttime operation for carts with working headlights and taillights, and several Grand Strand towns have. |
| Children | Every passenger under 12 must wear a fastened seat belt. |
Local ordinances layer on top: cities can set hours, routes, and cart-path rules, and the beach towns do. Check the City of Myrtle Beach's golf cart rules before assuming the state defaults apply where you are driving.
Why the Rules Matter After a Crash
Every requirement above becomes a liability argument the moment someone gets hurt.
A cart on a 45-mph road, out after dark without municipal authorization, five miles from its registered address, or driven by an unlicensed teenager was somewhere the law says it should not have been, and that fact feeds directly into South Carolina's comparative fault analysis. It cuts both ways: a car driver who hits a lawfully operated cart cannot hide behind the cart's mere presence on the road, and a cart operator who broke the rules hands the defense its argument.
Fault still has to cause the crash to count. An unpermitted cart T-boned by a texting driver is still the texting driver's crash. The percentages get argued under the state's 51 percent comparative negligence rule, and the rule violations set the opening positions.
Golf Cart Injuries Run Worse Than People Expect
A cart offers its occupants almost nothing in a collision: no doors that matter, no restraints for most passengers, no structure designed to absorb impact. Ejections produce head injuries at speeds a car would shrug off, and rollovers, on soft shoulders, tight turns, and sloped beach-town streets, crush hands, arms, and legs. Children, overrepresented as cart passengers, are overrepresented in the injuries.
The claims that follow are real injury claims: emergency care, orthopedic surgery, brain injury workups, and everything covered in our guide to valuing pain and suffering in South Carolina. Treat a cart crash like the vehicle collision it is, medically and legally, from day one.
Who Pays After a Grand Strand Golf Cart Crash
The answer depends on who was careless, and the candidates are more varied than in a car case:
- The at-fault car driver's liability policy, when a car strikes a cart, the most common serious-injury scenario.
- The cart owner's liability coverage, required for the permit itself, when the cart operator caused the harm.
- The rental operator, when a fleet business rented to an unlicensed or underage driver, skipped maintenance, or ignored the rules it was charging tourists to break.
- A homeowners policy, for some off-road and private-property incidents.
- Your own UM/UIM coverage, when the at-fault driver is uninsured or thin, though whether it reaches a cart occupant depends on policy language worth having read professionally. Our page on South Carolina UM and UIM coverage covers the framework.
Rental-fleet cases deserve special attention on the Grand Strand: the operator's paperwork, what it verified, what it warned, what it maintained, is discoverable, and a business model built on tourists in a hurry does not always survive that discovery well.