New grad RN jobs and nurse residency programs in South Carolina

A quarter of South Carolina RNs earn less than $37.17 an hour ($77,320 a year) and half earn more than $39.60. First-year offers tend to sit near the lower figure, since hospital pay scales usually rise with experience.

That puts South Carolina 39th of the 50 states and DC for median RN pay.

Pay is bunched together in South Carolina: only $2.43 an hour separates the 25th percentile from the median, a narrower gap than in most states.

The largest RN job market touching South Carolina is the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia area, with 27,010 RNs; that count includes nurses in North Carolina.

The South Carolina Board of Nursing licenses RNs in South Carolina.

South Carolina is in the Nurse Licensure Compact. If South Carolina is your primary state of residence, the license you earn after the NCLEX can be multistate, valid in every compact state. Nurses who live in another compact state can work in South Carolina on their home state's multistate license.

Every one of its neighboring states is in the compact too, so one license covers the whole region.

Yes, with conditions. South Carolina can give a graduate nurse temporary license for 90 days while you wait to test, if you have applied by exam, registered for the NCLEX and never failed it. You work under a licensed RN's supervision. It is revoked if you fail, or if you have not tested within 90 days.

Source: South Carolina Board of Nursing, NCLEX instructions (S.C. Code 40-33-36(D)), read October 2026. The permit makes it legal; whether you can use it depends on the employer, since not every hospital starts graduate nurses before they are licensed. Ask the recruiter.

29 of the 50 states and DC allow something like this, each with its own limits. See every state's rule.

South Carolina had one of the highest first-time NCLEX-RN pass rates in the country in 2025: 91.6% of the 3,216 U.S.-educated candidates who tested for a South Carolina license passed, 4.9 points above the national rate of 86.7%.

With 23 new-grad programs on our list, that is about 140 new test takers for each one, near the national figure of about 114.

The exam is the same everywhere; the rate tells you about the graduates who tested here, not about your own chances. See pass rates in every state.

Among its neighboring states, Georgia both pays RNs the most (a median of $93,550) and has the most new-grad programs on our list (59).