What’s law, what’s paused, and what’s dead after SC’s 2025 legislative session

ATLANTA, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) - Energy, liquor liability, education, and taxes all dominated attention for the last several months at the South Carolina State House.

Gov. Henry McMaster has already signed more than 70 new bills into law this year, with more on their way to his desk soon, but other priorities will have to wait until next year to try to get there.

“Especially at the last minute, we had a lot of big bills ,” Speaker of the House Murrell Smith, R–Sumter, told reporters following the final day of the session last week.

Among them were two major priorities for the year that McMaster signed into law Monday.

One aims to secure South Carolina’s energy capacity as the state faces major growth.

The other looks to provide relief to bars and restaurants struggling with skyrocketing liquor liability insurance costs while also reforming some aspects of South Carolina’s civil justice system — notably, the state’s t and several liability provisions, which concern who’s responsible for fault in lawsuits.

After months of disagreements between the Senate and the House of Representatives on both issues, lawmakers struck and sent final-week compromises to McMaster’s desk.

“That was a hard slog all the way through, but we were able to get an agreement to deal with the most pressing issues, so I’m pleased with that,” Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R–Edgefield, said of the compromise between the tort reform and liquor liability bills.

An effort to streamline South Carolina’s healthcare delivery system, found to be the most fragmented in the nation, has already taken effect. On April 28, McMaster signed a bill that merges three state health-related agencies — the existing Department of Mental Health, Department of Disabilities and Special Needs, and Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services — into the new Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities.

The governor has also signed several education bills into law.

Among them is the Educator Assistance Act, which will reform the teachers’ contract process and reduce burdensome paperwork in the hopes of keeping more teachers in the classroom amid a major shortage.

“We continue to raise teacher pay in South Carolina. We continue to put education first,” Rep. Todd Rutherford, D–Richland, said.

Another bill will attempt to reinstate the controversial private school voucher program, formally known as the Education Scholarship Trust Fund program.

The state Supreme Court found an earlier iteration was unlawful, violating the state constitution’s ban on public dollars directly benefiting private and religious schools, and this new program is expected to face another legal challenge.

In a session marked by major legislative priorities earning bipartisan , the voucher bill was almost entirely approved along party lines in the two Republican-dominated chambers, which both boast GOP supermajorities.

“I don’t know yet who this benefits. I don’t know why we did it,” Rutherford, the House’s Democratic leader, told reporters.

The legislature enacted several public safety measures, including legislation to crack down on child predators, to toughen penalties for drivers who flee from officers trying to pull them over, and to add the crime of fentanyl-induced homicide to the state code.

Meanwhile, the General Assembly’s approval of a hands-free bill means drivers will soon have to put their phones down when they are behind the wheel on South Carolina roads.

But that law, which bans people from holding or ing a cellphone while they are driving, won’t go into effect until September, and tickets won’t be written until the conclusion of a 180-day warning period, which will end next spring.

“In the big picture, we did not do any momentous legislation this year that’s going to be ed long after this year,” Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto, D–Orangeburg, said.

Some legislation will have to wait until next year to try again, while other pushes are dead for good.

The House ed a bill to revamp South Carolina’s income tax system, and it could eventually eliminate the state’s personal income taxes.

But senators won’t pick that up until next year, saying they want to take more time to study the budgetary impact of tax cuts and how to best implement them.

Efforts to expand legal gambling and pave the way for the state’s first casino — both of which McMaster has indicated he would veto — are also on hold, and Massey said the Senate would like to spend more time next year on legislation to strengthen South Carolina’s drunk driving laws.

And House leadership said the lower chamber will not touch the Senate’s resolution to remove elected state Treasurer Curtis Loftis from office, following a lengthy Senate investigation and hearing.

Loftis, a Republican, has said he plans to seek re-election in 2026.

“We need to let the voters decide whether they want to keep him in office,” Smith, the House Speaker, told reporters.

Lawmakers will return to the State House in the coming weeks to finalize the next state budget, so it can go into effect in early July.

Any other legislation that did not reach the governor’s desk this year can be picked up next January, when the General Assembly begins the second of this two-year session.

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