Global excellence. Statewide return.
MUSC has been part of South Carolina since 1824. Two centuries later, the state's only comprehensive academic health system has become one of its most powerful economic engines — with a direct workforce of more than 23,000, reaching patients in all 46 counties and training the health care workforce South Carolina is about to need.
An independent 2024 study put a number on that contribution. MUSC generates approximately $10.1 billion in annual economic activity and supports more than 52,000 jobs across the state. Few organizations in South Carolina have an economic footprint of this size.
The report that follows measures three things: the dollars MUSC and its suppliers move through the state economy, the jobs that activity creates, and the wages those jobs pay. It also looks at what those figures do not capture — the research, the graduates who stay, and the care delivered in places that would otherwise go without.
Most of MUSC's impact is concentrated in the Charleston Tri-county region, where MUSC generates roughly $7.5 billion in annual economic activity and supports 38,380 jobs. That is about 11% of all jobs in Charleston — and 45% of the region's entire health care industry.
The MUSC Regional Health Network carries that impact well beyond the coast, into communities where a single medical center reshapes a local economy:
Across the seven most rural of those counties — Florence, Marion, Lancaster, Chester, Orangeburg, Calhoun and Bamberg — MUSC supports roughly 1 in every 20 jobs.
The numbers measure activity. They don't capture what that activity builds.
MUSC's contribution to South Carolina reaches past dollars and jobs, into community health, research and the workforce the state will depend on next.
