The pros and cons of living
in Myrtle Beach.

The short answer

Is Myrtle Beach a good place to live?

It depends what you want from a place. Your housing money goes further, the winters are mild, and you are near the water. What you give up is walkability, higher pay, and some big city services.

Here is the whole trade, split into two lists so you can scan it.

Money

What it costs to live in Myrtle Beach

Housing is where you gain. A typical home here runs about $342,000. The same measure is about $737,000 in the New York area, $742,000 in Boston and $580,000 in Washington. Rent runs about 17 percent below the national average.

Everything else is closer to normal. Food, power and everyday items sit near the national average, so do not plan on the grocery bill falling. Pay is lower here too, which matters if you are still working.

Two costs are genuinely new. South Carolina taxes your car every year, which most northern states do not, and a second home is taxed at about three times the rate of a main home. Both are covered on our cost of living page, which compares your city with this one directly.

Weather

What the weather is really like

Winters are mild

January averages a high near 56 and a low in the mid 30s. Snow is rare: about an inch a year on average, and most years get none. Two recent winters each produced a 5 inch storm, and the record is 14 inches from a Christmas storm in 1989. When it does snow, roads and schools close for a day or two, because there is no reason to own plows here.

Summers are hot and humid

July averages a high near 87 and a low near 72. The area gets about 22 days a year at or above 90 degrees and almost none at 100, so the raw temperature is not extreme. The humidity is what people feel. Most newcomers say they adjust within a season or two.

It is brighter than most places people leave

The nearest long term weather station records about 62 percent of possible sunshine and 111 clear days a year. Pittsburgh runs about 42 percent, Buffalo about 47 percent, and Cleveland about 66 clear days. People from those cities notice it in the first month. The month by month numbers, including ocean water temperatures, are on our weather page.

Storms

Do hurricanes destroy houses in Myrtle Beach?

Hurricanes reach this coast and they do damage property. The last storm to flatten a large part of it was Hugo in 1989, more than 35 years ago. Since then the Grand Strand has taken a direct Category 1 landfall at Georgetown, a close pass from a Category 1, and a string of tropical storms. Those destroyed piers and dunes. They did not level the towns.

What actually damaged the most houses was water, and it was inland. When Florence came ashore in North Carolina in 2018, the wind here was survivable. Days later the Waccamaw River crested at a record 21 feet and flooded around a thousand homes and businesses near Conway and Socastee, miles from the ocean. Matthew did a smaller version two years earlier.

Homes built to the current coastal wind code are engineered for higher wind loads than older stock, which is part of why insurers price them differently. That is a construction standard, not a guarantee for any particular storm or any particular house. What decides the risk is the address: the year it was built, when the roof was last replaced, its flood zone, and whether it has flooded before. A Zone X designation is not proof that it has not.

Every storm since Hugo is listed, one by one, with what each did, on our hurricane history page. We wrote up how to pull a property's real flood history on how to find out if a house flooded. Insurance is higher on the oceanfront and drops as you move inland, and the coastal insurance page explains what drives a quote.

Getting around

It is a golf cart area, not a walking city

This is the complaint we hear most from people who moved from a real city, and it is fair. Outside a few pockets you cannot walk to a grocery store, and there is no transit network worth planning a life around. What the area has instead is golf carts. Large parts of the Grand Strand are built around them, and in many neighborhoods that is genuinely how people get to the beach, dinner and a neighbor's house.

There are rules. A cart needs a state permit, the driver needs a license and insurance, and it can only run on roads posted 35 mph or less, within four miles of the address on the permit. So the question for any house is not whether the neighborhood is cart friendly, it is what the speed limits are between that house and where you want to go. A 45 mph road you cannot drive along ends the trip. The rules by town are on our moving checklist.

Traffic

Traffic is lighter than newcomers expect

Summer brings visitors, and it still does not compare with a big city commute. Rush hour typically adds five to ten minutes. Leaving between 5 and 8 in the morning gets you most places without a real stop.

Which road you take matters more than the season. US-17 Business runs through stop lights end to end. SC-31 and SC-22 are limited access and usually faster even when the mileage is longer. Locals default to the highways and visitors do not, which is most of the difference.

For scale, the busiest road in the county carries about 82,000 vehicles a day averaged across the year, and the Long Island Expressway carries about 210,000. Off peak, North Myrtle Beach is about 30 minutes from Myrtle Beach, Surfside about 15, Murrells Inlet about 25, Conway about 25 and Carolina Forest about 20. Wilmington is under two hours, Charleston and Columbia about three.

The off season

What Myrtle Beach is like in the winter

Quieter, and less different than the reputation suggests. The water parks and some attractions close and some places trim their hours, but the town keeps running. Restaurants, shops and the boardwalk stay open, and from about October to April everything is easier to get into.

Locals use the off season. In the City of Myrtle Beach, dogs are allowed on the beach at any hour from the day after Labor Day through April 30; in summer they are limited to before 10 a.m. and after 5 p.m., and each town sets its own hours. Golf courses, restaurants and spas run off season rates, hotel rooms sell well below summer prices, and there is no line for any of it. Several of our clients say the off season is the reason they stayed: the vacation attractions spend the winter serving the people who live here.

Where you buy matters

Know whether you are buying in a visitor area or a year-round one

The Grand Strand is really two housing markets sitting next to each other. Some streets are mostly short-term rentals, close to the beach, busy in summer and quiet in January. Others are ordinary year-round neighborhoods where the same cars are in the same driveways in February.

Neither is better. They suit different plans. If you are buying an investment property, rental activity near the beach is the point, and our short-term rental rules page covers where it is allowed.

Rental activity is a matter of public record rather than opinion. Short-term rental permits are filed with the municipality, and an association's rental cap and minimum lease term are written into its covenants. Ask us for the covenants and the permit records on any address and read them yourself.

If you run a business

You cannot charge northern prices here

Business owners who move down repeatedly find they have to cut their rates. That is not a local quirk, it is the same fact that made the housing cheap: prices and wages across this market are lower than in a northern metro, so the going rate for your work is lower too. If your plan depends on keeping your old prices, price your service against local competitors before you count on the income. Plenty of people make the trade happily, because the lower cost of living absorbs it. It is only a problem when nobody warned you.

Healthcare

What medical care is here, and what is a drive

Better covered than most areas this size, and expanding. Grand Strand Medical Center in Myrtle Beach has 403 beds and is a verified adult Level I trauma center, so the most serious adult emergencies are treated here rather than transferred. Conway Medical Center has 222 beds, McLeod Health Seacoast in Little River 155, Tidelands Waccamaw in Murrells Inlet 124, Tidelands Georgetown 131 and McLeod Health Loris 50.

Three more hospitals are in progress: a 48-bed McLeod hospital in Carolina Forest, a 59-bed Grand Strand Health hospital on the US-17 Bypass expected in late 2027, and a 36-bed Tidelands hospital with MUSC at the SC-31 and SC-707 interchange expected in 2028. Bed counts and timelines come from each health system.

What is not here is Level I pediatric trauma and organ transplant. Both are at MUSC in Charleston, about two hours south, and some specialist care follows the same pattern. For veterans, the Myrtle Beach VA clinic is outpatient only and the nearest VA medical center is also in Charleston.

Small stuff that is not small

Bugs, and the rest of coastal life

Mosquitoes are more noticeable than in a dense city, because much of the county is low, wet and rural. Horry County runs a mosquito control program with truck and aerial spraying that starts in early May, and residents outside city limits can request treatment. Near marsh you also meet biting midges, which everyone here calls no-see-ums. They are small enough to pass through a standard screen, so a finer mesh and a fan on the porch do more than repellent. The big outdoor bugs locals call palmetto bugs live in trees and mulch, not inside houses, and one wanders indoors now and then. None of this is a reason not to move. All of it is a reason to budget for pest control and look at the screens.

Common questions

Living in Myrtle Beach FAQ

Sources: BEA regional price parities, NOAA climate normals, National Weather Service Wilmington, NOAA Springmaid Pier gauge, Horry County Mosquito Control, SCDOT traffic counts, Myrtle Beach beach rules, New York State on LIE volume. Hospital bed counts and project timelines come from each health system. Drive times are off-peak estimates. Household bills and observations are ours and are labelled as such.