One county. However many cities and towns are deciding inside it.
Charleston, Mount Pleasant, and North Charleston each keep the record in their own format, on their own portal, at their own pace. We read every one of them the same way and tie every decision back to the parcel it was about — so a search here doesn’t require already knowing which jurisdiction to search.
Of case records audited against their source documents, weighted to the corpus’s real composition, 99.51% agreed with the source — measured on the Charleston Board of Zoning Appeals corpus.
What that number measures, what it doesn’t, and why we won’t publish 100% →
Land-use decisions today. The rest of what government publishes, next.
Right now, everything on this page is board and council decisions — zoning appeals, rezonings, design review, the votes and conditions attached to them — read from meeting minutes and agendas. That is not the limit of what a county government publishes about itself.
Budgets, permits, licenses, inspections, and contracts are the plan for this county, not the product yet. We will say so plainly, right here, the day any of them go live — not before.
Drill down to one place.
City of Charleston
Zoning appeals, planning commission recommendations, and council’s final word — three boards, one thread per parcel.
See Charleston →Mount Pleasant
Design review, zoning appeals, and council votes — where a request has to clear more than one body before it’s decided.
See Mount Pleasant →North Charleston
Zoning appeals and planning commission action, read the same way and held to the same standard as everywhere else.
See North Charleston →What we hold inside this county, and whether it can carry a rate.
| Jurisdiction | Body | Record kind | Readable text | Rate? | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Charleston County | GIS parcel and sales layer | not_a_decision_source | not a document corpus | No | A reference layer, not a record of decisions. |
| City of Charleston | Board of Zoning Appeals | full_disposition | 99.2% | Yes | The source records every outcome, including refusals. |
| City of Charleston | City Council | full_disposition | 88.7% | No | Has readable text for 88.7% of its documents, below the 90% needed to divide by. |
| City of Charleston | Planning Commission | recommendation | 70.1% | No | The body recommends; another body decides. A recommendation is advice, not a result. |
| Mount Pleasant | GIS zoning layer | not_a_decision_source | not a document corpus | No | A reference layer, not a record of decisions. |
| North Charleston | City Council | approved_only | not a document corpus | No | The source lists what was adopted. A refusal cannot appear in it, so a rate computed from it would be 100% by construction. |
| North Charleston | Planning Commission | recommendation | 96.5% | No | The body recommends; another body decides. A recommendation is advice, not a result. |
| North Charleston | Board of Zoning Appeals | full_disposition | 98.7% | Yes | The source records every outcome, including refusals. |
A jurisdiction we haven’t named is one we can’t answer for — see the full coverage page for the tri-county picture and every row we’ve classified anywhere.
Have a parcel in the county already in mind?
Tell us the address or the TMS and we’ll tell you plainly whether the record covers it — including when it doesn’t.