Updated Aug 2026
South Carolina Lake Water Quality
249 lakes across 42 counties, 6 with a recent water-quality reading.
Lake Map
Get South Carolina water-quality updates
New water-quality readings for South Carolina lakes as SCDHEC publishes them. Unsubscribe anytime.
Where to stay near South Carolina's cleanest lakes
Cabins, resorts, and vacation rentals around Lake Marion (Clarendon County, SC) and the other cleanest South Carolina lakes pinned on the map. Live availability and prices.
Top-rated places to stay near Lake Marion (Clarendon County, SC)
Prices for Oct 2–4, 4 adults. Change dates on the map below.
Availability and prices from Stay22 partners (Booking.com, Vrbo, Expedia). We may earn a commission from bookings, at no extra cost to you.
South Carolina fishing & travel
Reservoirs in South Carolina
View all 2 reservoirs →2 of 249 South Carolina lakes (1%) are man-made reservoirs in the USACE National Inventory of Dams. 2 carry a High or Significant hazard rating. The oldest matched dam dates to 1925.
South Carolina Fishing & Recreation
Licenses, regulations, records, and where to fish across South Carolina.
Counties
All 42 South Carolina counties, ranked by average lake water quality. Compare them against every county nationwide in the county rankings, browse the full directory of lakes, or pick a different state.
South Carolina lists 249 lakes across 42 counties, 6 of them with a recent water-quality reading. Most of that sampling flows through monitoring run by the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, which feeds state, federal, and volunteer measurements into the EPA Water Quality Portal. The remainder are here because they are real named lakes, not because anyone has sampled them recently.
By surface area the largest lake here is Lake Wylie, at about 12,177 acres, and 7 of the lakes in this index cover more than 500 acres. Size is worth knowing before you go: a large deep basin buffers nutrient inputs by sheer volume, while a shallow one warms quickly and can turn over its whole water column in a single summer storm. Berkeley has the lowest nutrient and algae readings on average. With only 42 counties in the state, the cross-county spread is narrower than the within-county spread for most lakes.
Lake Match
Which lake suits how you actually use one?
Six questions — swimming, fishing, quiet, cabins, drive time — and a shortlist of lakes that fit, with the water quality behind each one.
Source: EPA National Aquatic Resource Surveys and the EPA Water Quality Portal.
More on lake water quality
A data snapshot of the lakes we track: the clearest and the greenest states, and where the water is improving.
How nutrient and algae readings are read against EPA ecoregion condition classes, what each class means in the water, and why a clean reading is not a clearance.
The clearest lakes in America, ranked by measured Secchi depth in feet from EPA monitoring data — and why the famously clear lakes are missing.