Every jurisdiction in this catalog has entries whose figures move when a bill passes, whose act takes effect on a later date, or whose program is repealed while its agency keeps advertising it. This page watches each jurisdiction's law, follows a bill through its own jurisdiction's process where its stages are recorded, and names the catalog entries each instrument touches.
10 instruments in South Carolina. Tracked across 51 jurisdictions. Every other jurisdiction on the board is still watched by hand.
A bill that died is listed only where a guide, an agency, or a news story has described it as current law. That is the failure that puts a number in front of a veteran which no assessor, registrar, or school will honor.
▲Expands benefitsRaised the Guard College Assistance lifetime cap to $25,000 and lifted the 130-hour limit for 2026-27.
For the fiscal year ending June 30, 2027, lets a South Carolina National Guard member qualify for College Assistance Program grants beyond the 130 semester hours in S.C. Code 59-114-30, allows up to one hundred percent of tuition and fees not exceeding twelve thousand dollars an academic year, and sets the lifetime maximum at twenty-five thousand dollars against the statute’s eighteen thousand. Ratified August 11, 2026; the Governor’s line-item vetoes of August 17, 2026 did not reach it. A proviso lapses with its fiscal year, so the statutory figures return unless the next appropriations act repeats it.
▲Expands benefitsCaps and conditions what anyone may charge a veteran for help with a VA benefits claim, with penalties for unauthorized fees.
Added Article 8 to Chapter 11, Title 25 at Sections 25-11-810, 25-11-820 and 25-11-840, and skipped 25-11-830 entirely. No person may receive compensation for preparing, advising, presenting or prosecuting a veterans benefits claim except as federal law permits; referral fees are barred except between licensed attorneys under a joint representation contract complying with the Rules of Professional Conduct; guaranteeing a specific benefit, level, percentage or amount is barred; upfront and nonrefundable fees are barred; any lawful fee must be in a written agreement signed before services, must be contingent on an increase in benefits awarded, and must not exceed five times the monthly increase or twelve thousand five hundred dollars, whichever is less, with any instalment plan interest free and no longer than twelve months. No compensation at all for a claim filed within the one-year presumptive period after release from active duty unless the veteran signs a waiver declining the free services available. A twelve-point font disclosure in prescribed words must be signed by the claimant and retained for a year after the relationship ends. Using a veteran’s own log-in credentials is prohibited, employing a medical provider to conduct a medical examination is prohibited, and anyone with access to veterans medical or financial information must pass an identity and criminal records check. Accredited representatives, agents and attorneys under 38 C.F.R. 14.629, attorneys handling VA medical care liens, and South Carolina veterans home employees are exempt. A violation is a misdemeanour with each benefits matter a separate offence, supports a South Carolina Unfair Trade Practices Act action, and can be enjoined by the Attorney General with civil penalties deposited into the Veterans’ Trust Fund. Tracked because the Code of Laws served by the Legislative Services Agency still ends Chapter 11 at Section 25-11-730, so the largest change to South Carolina veterans law in years is invisible to anyone reading the code rather than the ratified act, and because subsections (A) and (D) are in tension: (A) forbids any compensation federal law does not permit, while (D) prescribes a cap for a fee that (A) will usually forbid outside the accredited exemption.
▼Restricts benefitsRepealed the National Guard college loan program.
A Commission on Higher Education cleanup act repealed S.C. Code 59-111-75, the National Guard college loan repayment programme closed to new participants from the 2007-2008 academic year, whose remaining funds had already moved to the College Assistance Program. Signed May 18, 2026 and effective on approval. The published code still prints the section.
Sponsor
Shannon S. EricksonRepublican, House, District 124
▲Expands benefitsOpens the war veteran's child tuition waiver to a child who has lived in South Carolina since birth.
Amended S.C. Code 59-111-20 to read in three subsections. Subsection (A) keeps the grant and turns the veteran residency test into four alternatives, adding a child who has been a resident of South Carolina since birth, whatever the veteran’s residence. Subsection (B) re-enacts the wartime service requirement and the nine qualifying events unchanged, including the "items (4) and (5)" wording of item (8). Subsection (C) re-enacts the Chapter 112 residency, age twenty-six and undergraduate limits. Signed May 15, 2026 and effective on approval. The published Code of Laws still prints the 2025 text, and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs page cites it as "Section 59-11-20".
▲Expands benefitsAdded an Operation Inherent Resolve plate and an Armed Forces Surviving Spouse plate.
Amended S.C. Code 56-3-14950(A) to add Operation Inherent Resolve as a ninth campaign plate on the ordinary campaign plate fee terms, and 56-3-14970(A) to add Armed Forces Surviving Spouse, available to the surviving spouse of a military veteran with no award or Guard condition. Each section takes effect six months after the Department of Motor Vehicles approves the plate design; the rest of the act, which adds a SAFE registration notation and autism to the handicapped definition in 56-3-1910(A), takes effect May 15, 2027. Signed May 15, 2026. The design approval date is not on the legislative record, so the start date is the department’s to state.
Added Section 25-11-730. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs shall adopt and execute criteria, policies and procedures for admissions to and discharges from South Carolina veterans homes; shall set and collect fees for residence and services; and is authorised to receive the assignment of any state or federal benefit as full or partial payment of those fees. That is now the whole of the admission and fee law. Read with 2023 Act No. 60, which moved the homes from the Department of Mental Health to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs on July 1, 2024 for homes under a third-party service contract as of May 1, 2023 and on July 1, 2025 for the rest, the effect is that no statutory admission test survives beyond the Section 25-11-720 definition of a South Carolina veteran as an ex service South Carolina citizen discharged under other than dishonorable conditions. Tracked because the conditions a veteran is quoted, an honorable discharge, one year of South Carolina residency and a VA determination of the need for skilled or intermediate nursing care, appear nowhere in the statute, and the one-year residency figure sits against a definition that states no residency period. Those figures can now move without a legislative act.
Sponsor
Tom Young, Jr.Republican, Senate, District 24
Touches S.C. Code Ann. § 25-11-730 · S.C. Code Ann. § 25-11-710 · S.C. Code Ann. § 25-11-720
=No change to benefitsWould have required reporting of veterans home admission policies to the legislature without changing who is admitted.
Would have written into Section 25-11-730 a requirement that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs submit its veterans home admission and discharge criteria, policies and procedures to the legislative oversight committees within sixty days of adopting or amending them, for informational purposes only, and that the submission include a summary of stakeholder engagement and an analysis of potential impacts on low-income, disabled and minority veterans. Debate was adjourned repeatedly and the bill was recommitted to the House Committee on Medical, Military, Public and Municipal Affairs on January 28, 2026, and did not become law. Tracked because 2025 Act No. 5 had already moved the admission criteria and the fees entirely into department policy, so the failure of this bill means that policy-making carries no transparency, reporting or equity-analysis condition. The conditions a veteran is quoted for admission are set and can be changed by the department alone, with no obligation to tell the General Assembly.
▲Expands benefitsDeleted the residency requirement for burial in a state veterans cemetery.
Struck Section 25-11-80(F)(3), which had required an applicant for a plot in a state veterans cemetery to have been a South Carolina resident at entry into service, during service, at death, or for five years, with a waiver power. The code’s own Effect of Amendment note records the deletion. 2008 Act No. 258 had already reduced that residency figure from twenty years to five. What survives in subsection (F) is that the applicant must be a veteran or a member of the immediate family of a veteran, and that the veteran must have an honorable discharge from the Armed Forces. Tracked because published eligibility summaries, including the federal Army benefits library, still describe a South Carolina residency test with a waiver as a condition of burial, which will turn away a family that has moved out of state or moved in recently.
▲Expands benefitsLets a taxpayer deduct all military retirement income, removing every cap and age tier.
Two acts on the same subject in the same session amended Section 12-6-1171(A) to read that an individual taxpayer may deduct all military retirement income included in South Carolina taxable income. The Code Commissioner read the two amendments together. Act No. 156 is the Workforce Enhancement and Military Recognition Act and Act No. 228 is the Comprehensive Tax Cut Act of 2022; both first apply to tax years beginning after 2021. What they replaced was the 2016 Act No. 272 phase-in, which had allowed five thousand nine hundred dollars under age sixty-five and eighteen thousand dollars at sixty-five and above, rising annually to 2020. Tracked because the offset survives and is the part that changes the arithmetic: Section 12-6-1170(C)(1) reduces the general retirement income deduction by the amount deducted under Section 12-6-1171, and SC Revenue Ruling 22-11 confirms the reduction reaches both the three thousand and ten thousand dollar general retirement deduction in Section 12-6-1170(A) and the fifteen thousand dollar age sixty-five and older deduction in Section 12-6-1170(B), except where the military deduction is claimed by a surviving spouse. A retiree at sixty-five with more than fifteen thousand dollars of military retired pay loses both general deductions entirely.
▲Expands benefitsRepealed the requirement that a veteran enroll within three years of discharge to get in-state tuition.
Amended Section 59-112-50(C). Deleted the requirement that a veteran enroll within three years of discharge from clause (2)(a), deleted the parallel requirement for a transferee from clause (2)(b), and deleted subsection (C)(4) outright, which had carried the enrollment deadline for a veteran or dependent to receive the in-state rate. A veteran using Chapter 30, Chapter 31 or Chapter 33 entitlement at a South Carolina public institution now pays in-state tuition and fees without regard to how long they have resided in the State and without regard to how long ago they were discharged. The condition in Section 59-112-50(C)(3) that a covered individual must live in this State while enrolled was not touched. Tracked because published guidance and institutional residency pages still describe a three-year window, which would turn away a veteran who separated more than three years ago.
A bill moves when the people who vote on it hear from the people it affects. Enter your address to see who represents you in Congress and in your state legislature, and where to get free, accredited help with a VA claim: your county veterans service officer or town veterans’ agent, and your state’s service offices.