2028 Is Coming for Golf Carts on Carolina Beach — Here's What Actually Changes

There's a real deadline on the calendar for conventional golf carts in Carolina Beach, and it's worth understanding exactly what it says — because the headlines ("golf carts to disappear from Carolina Beach streets") oversell it in one direction and undersell it in another.

What the town actually passed

In March 2023, Carolina Beach's town council passed an ordinance phasing out conventional (non-LSV) golf carts from public streets. The mechanics:

• Since July 1, 2023, the town has issued no new permits for conventional golf carts. Only owners who already held a permit can keep renewing.
• Existing permit holders can keep renewing, year to year, through 2027.
• Starting January 1, 2028, conventional golf cart permits stop being issued or renewed entirely. After that date, only low-speed vehicles (LSVs) — plated, registered, street-legal vehicles capable of 20–25 mph — are allowed on Carolina Beach's public roads.

In other words: this isn't a sudden 2028 ban that appears out of nowhere. It's a five-year runway that's already half over, and the "grandfather" window for existing gas cart owners closes on a known date. Carolina Beach's own permit page confirms the same structure.

Why the town drew the line at LSVs specifically

Conventional golf carts are capped at 20 mph by the town's own definition and were never engineered or regulated as road vehicles — no plates, no state registration, no consistent safety equipment requirement. LSVs are a distinct, federally-defined vehicle class: titled, plated through the state, subject to the same basic road rules as any other registered vehicle. From a town's perspective, that's a meaningfully different (and more accountable) thing to have sharing a street with pedestrians and cars during a packed summer season.

What this means if you're renting, not owning

If you're a visitor, this changes nothing about how you book — you were never going to show up with your own cart anyway. What it does mean: any rental fleet you book from after January 1, 2028 has to be running LSVs to legally be on Carolina Beach streets at all. That's worth knowing if you're comparing rental companies, because not every operator on the island has made that switch yet.

JellyCarts already has. The entire fleet is street-legal LSVs — titled, plated, and unaffected by the phase-out, because it was never built around the vehicle class the ordinance is retiring. No last-minute fleet replacement, no gap season where availability craters while everyone else scrambles to convert.

If you own a conventional golf cart on the island and are wondering what to do before your permit stops renewing: that's a conversation with the town, not with us. But if you're planning a trip anywhere near that date, it's worth booking with an operator the ordinance was never going to touch in the first place.

The details, for the record

The measure is Ordinance No. 23-1199, "An Ordinance to Sunset of Golf Cart Allowances on Streets Within the Town of Carolina Beach," adopted March 14, 2023 on a 4–1 vote and codified at Sec. 16-79 of the town code. One detail worth knowing if you go looking: the draft in the agenda packet said December 31, 2025. It was amended from the floor to 2027 — the mayor proposed four years as a compromise after two council members pushed for five. The unamended draft still circulates online, which is how the wrong year occasionally turns up in secondhand accounts.

The town's reasoning wasn't abstract. The ordinance cites safety concerns rising alongside "exponential growth in tourism." The police chief told council the recurring problems were unbelted minors and people driving after drinking, and that the permit system made it "difficult to identify who owns a particular golf cart." Scale, from town staff: 729 permitted golf carts in 2022, 579 by March 2023. Not everyone agreed — the dissenting council member's objection was that no citation or accident data was ever presented.

Two amendments since are worth noting. In June 2024 the town widened its LSV definition to include gas-powered vehicles, matching a 2023 change in state law — so this was never a gas-versus-electric rule. It's a registered-versus-unregistered rule. The same amendment let existing town-approved golf cart taxi businesses acquire additional permits through December 31, 2027, but explicitly did not exempt them from the sunset. As of August 2026, no repeal or extension has been adopted. The date has not moved.

If you own property here, this is a different question

For a second-home or rental-property owner, the phase-out isn't trivia — it's a purchasing decision with a deadline attached.

A conventional golf cart bought today cannot be permitted in Carolina Beach at all. New permits stopped on July 1, 2023, and only owners already in the program may renew. If you don't hold a permit now, there is no path to legally operating a non-LSV cart on town streets — buying one for the beach house means buying a vehicle you can't drive there. If you do hold one, it renews through 2027 and then stops, which also means a permitted non-LSV cart on this island has a resale value with a known expiration date that any buyer will price in.

The clean answer is an LSV, which the ordinance never touched and which needs no town operating permit at all. The other clean answer is not to own one. If your cart mostly sits between guest stays, a long-stay rental or per-stay rentals here (a full week runs $590, delivered free) cost less than a cart plus insurance plus storage plus the charging problem — and none of it becomes obsolete on a date set by a council vote. We laid out the property-owner math separately.

Worth saying plainly: this applies to Carolina Beach only. Kure Beach is a separate municipality with no equivalent sunset — though in practice it already requires carts to be "tagged and licensed, just like any other vehicle," which lands in a similar place. Parking is a separate system again, with its own rules in the parking guide.

Dates and rules are set by the town and can change. Confirm with the Town of Carolina Beach before making a purchase decision.

Sources: Town of Carolina Beach Ordinance No. 23-1199 and Ord. 24-1227; town council minutes of March 14, 2023 and June 11, 2024; WECT, Port City Daily, Town of Carolina Beach.