Shade each region
Colour intensity carries the value. The right choice for rates, shares and per-capita figures, which are already adjusted for how big or populous a region is.
Open the templateAll maps
South Carolina County Map Maker
A blank South Carolina county map to print, and a builder to fill it with your own data. Download the free outline of all 46 counties, or upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive South Carolina map you can embed anywhere.
Blank South Carolina map, free to download
All 46 counties, as a clean outline. Print it, colour it in, or drop it into a document — no account and no attribution required.
Free for any use, including commercial and classroom. Generated from the same boundaries the builder uses.
Download SVGWhat a South Carolina map shows
South Carolina's 46 counties are unusually even in size and unusually uneven in everything else. The state tilts from the Blue Ridge corner down to the Atlantic, and almost every measure you might map tilts with it. Growth clusters in three places: the Upstate along the I-85 corridor through Greenville, Spartanburg and Anderson; the midlands around Columbia in Richland and Lexington; and the coast, where Charleston, Berkeley, Dorchester, Horry and Beaufort have been absorbing new arrivals for two decades. Between the Upstate and the sea runs a band of rural counties along the I-95 corridor — Allendale, Bamberg, Hampton, Marion, Lee, Williamsburg — where population has been falling, median income sits far below the state figure, and county governments run on a fraction of the tax base their neighbours enjoy. That contrast is why so many South Carolina stories are told on a county map: the geography and the disparity line up almost exactly, and 46 similar-sized shapes make the pattern legible at a glance.
Three ways to draw South Carolina
Shade the regions when your number is a rate, size a marker when it is a count. Getting this backwards is the most common way a data map misleads.
A sized marker per region
One symbol on each region, scaled by value. Use it for counts and totals, where shading the land area would just redraw the population map.
Open the templateProportional circles
Circles sized by value, sitting over the outline. Reads well when a few regions dominate and small ones would otherwise disappear into a shade.
Open the templateWhen to map South Carolina
Your data is reported by South Carolina county
State health indicators, Department of Employment and Workforce labour figures, Election Commission returns, Department of Education report cards and the Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office data sets are all published by county.
You are showing a rate or a share
Poverty rate, uninsured rate, unemployment rate, share of the vote, median household income. Rates are already adjusted for population, which is what shading a region needs.
You want to show the corridor split
Growth along I-85 and the coast against decline along I-95 is the fundamental South Carolina story, and it is a geographic story. A county map states it without a paragraph of setup.
You need a blank map to print or fill in
Classroom work, hurricane and evacuation planning, sales territories, colour-by-hand sessions. The free outline above prints cleanly at any size.
When not to map South Carolina
You are mapping totals rather than rates
Shade by a raw count and Greenville, Richland, Charleston and Horry win every time. Anything that grows simply because more people live there belongs on a sized symbol.
Your unit is a metro or a school district
The Charleston metro spans three counties, the Greenville–Spartanburg metro spans several more, and a number of counties still contain more than one school district. Forcing these onto counties misplaces what you are describing.
Only a few counties have data
The smallest counties hold well under ten thousand people, so survey estimates and disease counts are frequently suppressed there. Twenty grey shapes are a worse table than a ranked list of the counties you actually have.
The story is a coastline, not a county
Storm surge, beach erosion and flood zones follow the shore, not county lines. Coastal counties reach far inland, and shading a whole county for a coastal event overstates it badly.
How to make a South Carolina map
From a spreadsheet to a published map, step by step.
Download the blank map, or start from the template
The free outline above is a plain SVG of all 46 counties — print it, or drop it into a document. To build with data, open the PlotSet South Carolina (counties) template, which comes with sample data already bound.
Prepare a county column and a value column
One row per county: the county name or its five-digit FIPS code in the first column, your number in the second. South Carolina FIPS codes all begin 45.
Upload or connect your data
Import a CSV or Excel file, paste from a spreadsheet, or connect a Google Sheet so the map can be refreshed when the source updates.
Pick the style that fits the measure
Shade the counties for a rate, or switch to symbols or bubbles for a count. Same geography, same data, different encoding.
Choose a colour scale on purpose
Sequential for a low-to-high measure, diverging only when a real midpoint exists — the state average, zero change, a 50 per cent line. Four to six steps read more precisely than a smooth gradient.
Publish, embed or export
Publish for a live interactive map with a tooltip on every county, or export a PNG, SVG or PDF for a report or a deck.
Start from the South Carolina template with sample data already loaded, then swap in your own.
Open the templateGetting your South Carolina data to join
What the place column has to look like, and where to find data that already matches.
McCormick is spelled with a space in this geography
The county appears as "Mc Cormick" in the map's own data, while nearly every state and federal table writes "McCormick". It is the one county in South Carolina that will silently fail a name join, so either normalise the string or match on FIPS.
South Carolina FIPS codes start at 45
45001 is Abbeville, 45091 is York. Store the column as text so the leading 4 survives, and note that the county part is odd-numbered rather than sequential.
County names are not city names
Columbia is in Richland, Myrtle Beach is in Horry, Hilton Head is in Beaufort, Rock Hill is in York, and Charleston the city sits in Charleston County but its suburbs run well into Berkeley and Dorchester.
Where to get South Carolina county data
The Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office, the state public health agency, the Department of Employment and Workforce, the Election Commission and the Census Bureau's ACS all publish county-level tables.
Common mistakes on a South Carolina map
Losing McCormick County to a spelling
A name join drops it and leaves one blank shape in the western corner, with no error to warn you. Check your row count after the join, or match on the five-digit code.
Shading counts instead of rates
It draws a population map — Greenville, Richland, Charleston and Horry light up and the rural band along I-95 disappears, which is the opposite of what most South Carolina stories are about.
Ignoring suppressed values in small counties
Allendale holds around eight thousand people, and health and survey figures there are often withheld. A suppressed value is not a zero, and colouring it as one is a real error rather than a cosmetic one.
Trying to label all 46 counties
The names do not fit at any reasonable size. Label the counties your argument rests on and let the hover tooltip carry the rest.
South Carolina map questions
Yes. The outline above is a free SVG of all 46 South Carolina counties — right-click to save it, print it, or drop it into a worksheet or document. No account needed.
Put your own data on the South Carolina map
Upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive map in a couple of minutes — free, no credit card.