E-Verify requirements in South Carolina: every employer, and a license on the line

As of September 2026, South Carolina requires every private employer in the state to verify new hires through E-Verify within three business days of hire, with no employee-count threshold, under S.C. Code section 41-8-20. The law used to allow an alternative: checking a South Carolina driver's license or ID card, or an equivalent from another state with standards at least as strict. That alternative ended January 1, 2012; E-Verify has been the required method since. South Carolina backs the requirement with one of the more aggressive license-suspension schedules among mandate states, run by the state's own licensing agency.

Who is covered

S.C. Code section 41-8-20 covers every private employer in South Carolina, regardless of size. There is no exemption in the statute for small businesses, part-time hiring, or seasonal work. The statute is framed around a legal fiction worth understanding: South Carolina treats every private employer as holding a "South Carolina employment license," which is the license the enforcement scheme below actually suspends or revokes. A business does not need a separate, named state license for E-Verify purposes to be exposed to that consequence; the employment relationship itself is treated as the licensed activity.

What South Carolina employers must do, and by when

1. Register with E-Verify if not already enrolled.
2. Complete Form I-9 for the new hire in full, on the standard federal timeline.
3. Create the E-Verify case within three business days of the date the employee starts work. This is South Carolina's own statutory clock, one of the tighter deadlines among mandate states.
4. Resolve any tentative nonconfirmation under the federal process before taking adverse action.
5. Keep both the E-Verify record and the Form I-9 on file; South Carolina requires the I-9 in addition to the E-Verify case, not as an alternative to it.
6. Respond to an LLR inquiry promptly if selected for a random audit or named in a complaint, since the probationary reporting schedule below starts running from the point of a finding.

Records to keep

Keep the E-Verify case documentation and the completed Form I-9 together for each employee, since the statute requires both. There is no South Carolina-specific retention period longer than the standard federal I-9 rule documented for this statute, so the safest approach is to follow the federal I-9 retention period, the later of three years after hire or one year after employment ends, and to keep the E-Verify record for at least as long. An employer placed on probation after a first violation additionally needs to keep the quarterly compliance reports it files with LLR during that one-year period.

Penalties, including license suspension

South Carolina's Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, through its Office of Immigration Compliance, investigates complaints and conducts random audits of private employers. Two separate violation types carry two different consequences:

• Verification-process violation (failing to run E-Verify within three business days): on a finding after an audit, LLR places the employer on probation for one year, during which the employer must submit quarterly reports demonstrating compliance.
• Knowingly or intentionally employing an unauthorized alien: a separate and more serious finding that triggers license suspension on an escalating schedule:
  • First occurrence: suspension of the employer's licenses for at least 10 days but not more than 30 days.
  • Second occurrence: suspension for at least 30 days but not more than 60 days.
  • Third occurrence: revocation of the employer's licenses.

While a license is suspended, the statute bars the employer from engaging in business open to the public, opening for business, employing an employee, or otherwise operating, which makes a South Carolina suspension functionally a forced shutdown rather than a narrower restriction on one activity. Because the underlying "license" is the state's fictional employment license rather than, say, a single professional certification, suspension reaches the business's ability to operate at all, not just its ability to hire.

A worked example: the two audit outcomes compared

This is an invented example to show why the two violation types matter separately, not a real company. LLR audits a 9-employee HVAC contractor in Greenville and a 9-employee landscaping company in Columbia in the same quarter. The HVAC contractor was running E-Verify but consistently missed the three-business-day window, sometimes creating cases a week or two after a new technician started. The landscaping company never enrolled in E-Verify at all and, when asked, could not document how it had verified two recent hires.

The HVAC contractor's problem is a verification-process violation: it was doing the right thing late. LLR's response is the one-year probation and quarterly reporting track, not license suspension, because the contractor was in fact verifying its hires, just outside the statutory window. The landscaping company's problem is potentially the more serious one, a knowingly-employing finding if the audit turns up an unauthorized worker among the unverified hires, which puts the escalating license-suspension schedule in play starting at 10 to 30 days for a first occurrence. Being late is a process failure; never verifying at all is what exposes a business to losing its ability to operate.

How this sits on top of Form I-9

E-Verify runs off the data already entered on Form I-9 and cannot be used before the I-9 is complete. South Carolina's statute requires both the I-9 and E-Verify for every new hire; the three-business-day E-Verify deadline runs from the start of employment, which in practice means the I-9 needs to be finished well inside that same window so there is time left to create and resolve the E-Verify case. Running E-Verify before an offer is accepted, or before the I-9 is complete, is not what the statute requires and would not count toward the three-day deadline in the way the employer might expect.

What a staffing agency placing workers into South Carolina must do

A staffing or recruiting agency is a private employer under section 41-8-20 with respect to its own placed workers, with no headcount exemption to check first, unlike a threshold state. The agency needs to be registered with E-Verify and needs to run every South Carolina placement through it within three business days of that person starting work for the agency. Because South Carolina's license-suspension scheme reaches the employer's own ability to operate in the state, an agency with an established South Carolina presence has more at stake in a compliance lapse than an agency making an occasional placement there; either way, the agency's own enrollment and per-hire compliance is what LLR would examine in an audit, not the client's.

A compliance checklist for South Carolina employers

1. Confirm the business itself is registered with E-Verify, regardless of headcount.
2. Complete Form I-9 in full for every new hire, then create the E-Verify case within three business days of the start date.
3. Keep both the I-9 and the E-Verify case record on file together.
4. If selected for an LLR audit or a complaint, respond promptly and be ready to show hire-by-hire documentation, not just registration status.
5. If placed on probation after a finding, track the quarterly reporting schedule for the full one-year period.
6. If using a staffing agency for South Carolina roles, confirm the agency's own E-Verify enrollment and three-day compliance, since the agency's status is what an audit of the agency would examine.
7. Treat a late E-Verify case as a real compliance gap worth fixing immediately, not a minor timing issue; the process-violation track still leads to a year of quarterly reporting if it turns into an audit finding.

For whether your agency needs a state license to operate in South Carolina beyond E-Verify, see employment agency license requirements. For the paperwork sequence around a new hire more broadly, see the contractor onboarding checklist. For how South Carolina compares with the other states that mandate E-Verify, see E-Verify requirements by state.