Retiring in South Carolina
Every figure below is sourced to South Carolina’s own publications and dated. Estimates only, and not tax advice.
Retirement tax by state
What your state actually takes from a 401(k) withdrawal, a pension, and Social Security — in dollars, not a yes/no list.
Brokerage account growth
Long-term index-fund growth after expense-ratio drag — and what your state takes from the gains at withdrawal.
Roth vs. Traditional
Decided on the two rates that actually govern it — yours now, and yours at withdrawal, in the state you'll retire in rather than the one you're in.
Contribution limit optimizer
2026 limits, employer match, the 60-63 super catch-up, and whether the Roth catch-up mandate applies to you.
Required minimum distribution
When your RMDs start under SECURE 2.0, how much this year's is, and what missing it costs.
Backdoor Roth pro-rata
What a backdoor Roth conversion would actually cost you in tax — the pro-rata rule most calculators only describe.
Self-directed IRA real estate (UDFI)
The tax a leveraged rental owes inside a self-directed IRA — computed at trust rates, not the rate you'd assume.
South Carolina at a glance
- 401(k) and IRA withdrawals
- Partly excluded
- From age 65.
- Social Security
- Not taxed
- Top marginal rate
- 5.21%
- The top of 2 graduated brackets.
- Tax year
- 2026
- Brackets are legislated and change on a fixed calendar, so the year matters.
- South Carolina's retirement package is a stack of interacting, income- and age-limited deductions rather than a clean exemption, and the interactions all run one way — claiming one deduction shrinks another. Modelling any single one in isolation overstates the relief.
- Act 110 of 2026 rebuilt the front of the South Carolina return (rates, and the replacement of federal deductions with SCIAD) but did not, on the face of the act, repeal or amend the retirement deductions in Sections 12-6-1170 and 12-6-1171 — the act's own text cross-references 12-6-1170(B) when computing SCIAD, which confirms 12-6-1170 survives. See NEEDS_VERIFICATION: whether the dollar amounts in those sections were adjusted for 2026 was not confirmed against a post-Act-110 SCDOR publication.
- DELIBERATE OMISSION: autoIraProgram is not populated. South Carolina has no state-facilitated auto-IRA employer mandate.