Here are critical SC jobs with staffing shortages. Are they on the rise?
Critical public service positions across South Carolina are struggling to be filled.
Here’s a look at some of the shortages affecting professions across the Palmetto State.
Nurses
South Carolina faces a shortage of qualified nurses, a shortage that threatens to grow over time.
The state has 90,000 registered nurses today, but the need is greater and only expected to get larger. By 2037, data shows that South Carolina will face a shortage of 11,860 full-time nursing positions, or 19% of the Palmetto State’s projected need, according to the federal Health Resources and Services Administration. That would make South Carolina’s one of the top five worst shortages in the country.
That shortage is caused partly by a lack of qualified instructors, said Teshieka Curtis-Pugh, executive director of the South Carolina Nurses Association.
“We’ve turned away 80,000 qualified nursing candidates, because we don’t have enough nursing instructors to teach them,” Curtis-Pugh said. Those instructors are required to hold advanced degrees themselves, “and getting a master’s or a doctor’s degree is expensive.”
That will be made more difficult, she said, under a Trump administration initiative that will no longer classify nursing as a “professional” degree for federal loan purposes and cap lifetime loans at $100,000. The U.S. Department of Education says the change will incentivize graduate-level nursing programs to decrease costs, but South Carolina nurses and the American Nurses Association are petitioning against the proposed change, arguing it closes the door on needier students being able to go into nursing.
The state is trying to help through the $10 million BOLD (Better Outcomes, Less Debt) Nursing Faculty Program from the S.C. Student Loan Corporation. The program provides up to $90,000 in tuition reimbursement to nursing graduate students who teach their future colleagues at a state university.
Locally, Lexington Medical Center this year partnered with the University of South Carolina’s College of Nursing to open a 52,000-square-foot satellite facility at the hospital’s West Columbia campus. Over the next five years, the facility will graduate an additional 400 nursing students, an 80% increase, the hospital said in a press release.
“In addition to our partnership with the USC College of Nursing to increase the number of nursing graduates, Lexington Health is focused on attracting and retaining nurses. The most important way we do that is through building a culture that values nursing,” wrote Melissa Taylor, chief nursing officer at Lexington Health in a statement.
The hospital maintains a mix of veteran and newer nurses. “Lexington Health offers nurse residency programs for newly graduated registered nurses with less than one year of experience” designed to provide additional training and mentorship, Taylor wrote.
While Prisma Health has managed to keep nursing vacancies and turnovers at its Columbia-area hospitals below the national average, Chief Human Resources Officer Amy Linsin wrote in an email, “The reality is that there isn’t an abundance of nursing talent across the country.”
“Looking ahead, a critical question for South Carolina will be whether we can continue to graduate and attract enough nurses to meet the growing demand for care,” she wrote.
Law enforcement
South Carolina has openings in law enforcement at state and local levels.
In recent years, the state has increased funding for state agencies such as Highway Patrol, the State Law Enforcement Division and Probation, Parole and Pardons. But that has still left county sheriff’s offices and municipal police departments struggling to fill openings, said J.J. Jones, executive director of the S.C. Law Enforcement Officers’ Association.
“It’s better than it was, but nowhere near where it needs to be,” Jones said.
Jones estimates the state’s total police force was down 30% from where it needed to be at the height of the COVID pandemic, and numbers have gone up since then, agencies still have too many vacancies.
“I hear the teachers talk about missing 500 teachers, but we’re down 3,000 law enforcement officers,” Jones said.
Like other fields, the promise of more money somewhere else has drawn some officers away from the profession, whether in private security or elsewhere.
“They get used to having a normal life where you can be home at 5 o’clock,” he said. “If a guy or girl gets their 25 years in, they hit retirement age about the time the kids need money for college, and then you can go work for Food Lion or Chick-fil-A and still draw a full salary.”
Jones praised state lawmakers for partly restoring a program that allows employees to continue serving after they can begin drawing retirement, but only if they take a year off the force in between.
A 2024 survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police found that the average department is operating with a 10% deficit in personnel, with recruitment reportedly harder than it was five years ago.
Three-quarters of the agencies responding to the survey said they were lowering recruiting standards on tattoos, facial hair and appearance, as well as increasing pay and recruitment efforts. About a third of agencies have had to reduce some services due to staffing challenges.
Younger officers are more likely to leave the profession, the survey found, but the surge of police officers hired in the 1990s are also nearing retirement and leaving the profession in droves, the report found.
South Carolina currently has 13,527 active duty police officers, according to data from the S.C. Criminal Justice Academy. But the state does not keep a central database of open positions at local law enforcement agencies.
Teachers
South Carolina has long struggled with filling teaching roles in all 1,200 public schools across the state. But the state Department of Education declared in November that it has stabilized the number of teachers leaving the classroom in 2025.
The department touted the annual Supply and Demand Report from the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention and Advancement, which collected data from school districts around the state. It shows a 32% decrease in the number of teacher vacancies year over year. It’s the second straight year the number of vacancies statewide has dropped, and the third straight year the state has seen the number of teachers departing fall, the report says.
The report says there were 706 vacancies at the beginning of the 2025-26 school year compared to 1,043 the year before. This school year started with 300 fewer teacher vacancies statewide, 350 fewer departures and 900 fewer new hires. Those numbers represent a 5% decrease in people leaving teaching positions, and districts report that 19% of those who left had retired and another 25% moved to a job with another school district.
“Teachers are the heartbeat of our schools,” S.C. Education Superintendent Ellen Weaver said in a statement accompanying the release of the report. “When they thrive, students soar. Everything starts with great educators—and that’s why supporting, equipping, and rewarding them remains my top priority.”
The S.C. Education Department said that starting teacher salaries have risen 52% since 2019, making schools in the Palmetto State competitive with the Southeastern average. Weaver is also requesting a $2,000 across the board bump in the teacher salary schedule in next year’s state budget.
Patrick Kelly, government affairs director for the Palmetto State Teachers Association, compared the report to the improvements shown in the recent statewide school report cards.
“We’ve enacted policies that have improved lives” for both teachers and students, Kelly said. “I think teachers are optimistic, and it’s encouraging.”
Kelly said the improved numbers could partly be attributed to S.C. legislators passing the Educator Assistance Act earlier this year. That law strengthened job protections for teachers, partly by giving the state board of education more leeway in deciding whether to suspend teachers’ certification if they left a teaching job before their contract was up.
On top of better pay, Dena Crews, president of the South Carolina Education Association, says that teachers are feeling more support from their school districts.
“Many of our districts are starting to listen to our educators and what their concerns are and what their needs are, and they are trying to make life as good as it can be for students as well as educators,” Crews said. “So just the respect issue contributes to educators staying.”
That’s better for students who might otherwise start the school year with a long-term substitute, only to have to shift gears when a new full-time teacher is hired.
“That’s like they’re beginning the school year all over again,” Crews said. “It gives them a great solid foundation to start with the teacher they will have throughout the school year.”
But more action is needed if the state is to reduce its vacancy rate further, Kelly said. Teachers still have more immediate concerns about class sizes and student discipline that they say make it harder for them to teach.
A quarter of South Carolina’s open positions are in special education, Kelly said, meaning the shortage has a disproportionate impact on the state’s most vulnerable students.
“Finishing the governor’s stated goal of getting starting salaries to $50,000 is the absolute starting place for driving down vacancy numbers,” he said. “That will have a financial impact and a moral impact, because a lot of teachers have already internalized the governor’s call.”
Crews said she hasn’t seen data about whether the decline in new hires might mean schools are simply getting by with fewer teachers teaching more students per class.
“I hope that’s not the case,” she said. “Whatever the need is in a school district, I hope the need was met and we have the right people in position to meet those needs.”
This story was originally published December 4, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Here are critical SC jobs with staffing shortages. Are they on the rise?."
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