The SC House is set to take up its spending plan. A fight with the Senate is already expected. By Nick Reynolds Mar 5, 2026 COLUMBIA — Members of the S.C. House of Representatives will converge on the Statehouse for the start of budget week March 9, an arduous several days of debate where lawmakers finalize their chambers’ tweaks to Gov. Henry McMaster’s budget proposal.
There’s still much to decide: what programs get funded, what programs should be cut and what policy changes they can reasonably enact through the state spending plan. What’s currently settled is that there will likely be a fight with the Senate when it passes its version of the spending bill later this spring.
Members of the House Ways and Means Committee met early in the day March 5 to unveil its final take on a proposed $13.9 billion spending plan for next year they say will bolster public services while encouraging economic growth through millions of dollars in anticipated tax cuts.
“I shouldn't read so much news on some of the sites I've read,” House Ways and Means Committee Chair Bruce Bannister, R-Greenville, told colleagues. “But a lot of people want to say that South Carolina is not doing well, and that is just not accurate. Anybody who is campaigning on the idea that things aren't going very well in the state of South Carolina either don't live here or aren't paying attention.”
Some of the decisions are already likely to make waves.
A $1 billion request from McMaster to help shore up state highway revenues was underfunded by half, while a $150 million request by the S.C. Department of Commerce intended to make up for cost overruns at Scout Motors' Blythewood-based also went unfunded, punted off for discussions with Senate colleagues later in session.
A $150 million increase in teacher pay requested by McMaster will be fully funded, though the House seems poised to underfund his request for his ongoing in-state student tuition freeze initiatives by millions of dollars — an effort Bannister said was to encourage students to take on more pragmatic majors in school that would land them jobs.
“I hate to pick on anything like French literature, basket weaving or some other thing that might be super interesting,” Bannister told reporters. “Somebody might really be passionate about it, but they also need to get a degree that will help them get a job.”
The Senate has not finalized its plans for the budget. But it already appears to be heading in a drastically different direction.
As the House pursues a near-$300 million one-time allocation to conform with tax cuts in President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, Senate lawmakers appear headed in the opposite direction, eyeing other uses — including the potential return of legislative earmarks — for the estimated-$1.4 billion in one-time dollars available to budget writers this year.
The Senate has also approved nearly $600 million in tax cuts and counting after drastically expanding the scope of a planned increase in the state’s Homestead Property Tax exemption. That effort is backed by the Republican caucus and the South Carolina Association of Counties.
The House of Representatives’ initial plan underfunds those anticipated cuts by hundreds of millions of dollars, laying the groundwork for a potential fight in conference committees later in the spring.
“I would be hopeful that the House would want to cut as much as we can responsibly cut,” Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, told reporters in late February.
Asked about the discrepancies, Bannister noted talks are still in the early phases. But there will almost inevitably be differences needing working out before the spending bill heads to the governor’s desk later this year.
“The Senate has a lot of ideas. We have a lot of ideas, and those will come together in a way that's reasonable,” Bannister told reporters. “We're not going to bankrupt the state of South Carolina, racing to the bottom. We're going to do things responsibly, and figure out where we get the most bang for our buck.”
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