HGTV’s Battle on the Beach Is Coming to the Grand Strand — Here’s Everything You Need to Know

Season 5 of the hit HGTV renovation competition was filmed right here on the South Carolina coast — and it premieres June 1, 2026.

The Grand Strand Steps Into the Spotlight

There is a particular kind of morning that belongs exclusively to the South Carolina coast. The air is already thick and warm before the sun clears the dunes, the pelicans are working the shallows, and the beach houses along the Atlantic sit quiet and salt-bleached in the early light, their porches holding the promise of whatever the day decides to bring. It is the kind of morning that has drawn vacationers to the Grand Strand for generations — and now, it is the kind of morning that a national television crew spent weeks filming in Garden City, South Carolina.

HGTV’s hit renovation competition series Battle on the Beach returns for its fifth season — and this time, the show has set up camp squarely on the Grand Strand. Production crews arrived in Garden City Beach in March 2026 and spent weeks transforming three oceanfront vacation properties into the most ambitious renovation challenge in the show’s history. The result will debut on national television on June 1, 2026, and put this beloved stretch of the South Carolina coast in front of millions of viewers at once.

For those of us who have always known that this part of the Carolina coast is something special, there is a certain satisfaction in watching the rest of the country find out. And for anyone planning a visit — to Cherry Grove Beach, to Ocean Drive, to Crescent Beach or Windy Hill, or to Garden City itself — the timing could not be better. The Grand Strand is having its moment, and it has earned every frame of it.

What Is Battle on the Beach?

Battle on the Beach is not your standard home makeover show, and that distinction matters. Where most renovation programming ends with a teary reveal and a finished living room, this series is organized around something more practical and more ruthless: short-term rental performance. The homes don’t just have to look good. They have to earn. The team whose finished property commands the highest peak-season nightly rental rate wins the grand prize — a cash payout of at least $50,000 — which means every design decision carries the weight of actual economics. A beautiful kitchen that kills the flow of a vacation rental layout is not just an aesthetic problem; it is a competitive disadvantage.

The format made an impression. The previous season of the show attracted 15.5 million viewers across linear and streaming — numbers that speak to a particular appetite in the viewing public for renovation competition that feels tethered to real-world stakes rather than pure spectacle. Season 5 arrives with that audience already in place, and with a location that is going to make every frame of it feel like a vacation.

Season 5: The Cast, the Stakes, and the Challenges

This season brings together three of HGTV’s most recognizable names as mentors, each guiding a two-person renovation team through seven weeks and a $100,000 budget. Sarah Baeumler of Rock the Block, Mika Kleinschmidt of 100 Day Dream Home, and Ty Pennington of Rock the Block are each mentoring one two-person team of promising renovators as they vie to transform lackluster beachfront vacation properties — the biggest homes in Battle on the Beach history — into waterfront escapes.

The three competing teams bring their own dynamics to the floor. Married couple Steven and Angelina Jacobs of Waterbury, Connecticut; husband-wife team Josiah and Anna Julian of Baltimore, Maryland; and mother-daughter duo Michelle Mueller and Sydney Lorence of Lincoln, Nebraska arrive with different skill sets, different design instincts, and presumably different theories about what a Grand Strand vacation renter actually wants. That last question — design for the guest, not the camera — is where this kind of competition lives or dies.

Serving as judges are Tristyn and Kamohai Kalama, the husband-and-wife renovation duo from HGTV’s Renovation Aloha, who evaluate each week’s transformed space on the only metric that ultimately matters: rental value improvement. Their role turns the weekly reveal into a business test, not just a design reveal, because the teams are building for rental value as well as style. Each week, the winning team faces a choice that sharpens the competition considerably — pocket $3,000 immediately, or roll the dice and add $6,000 to the final grand prize pool. It is the kind of decision that tells you a lot about how a team is reading its own chances.

The design challenges this season carry an extra layer of creativity. The teams will overhaul the dated digs while navigating unprecedented design challenges, including repurposing discarded roadside finds in their homes and swapping partners for the chance at additional prize money. Those kinds of curveballs are what separate a competition from a collaboration — and what keep viewers coming back week after week to see who holds up under pressure.

Over the course of seven episodes, the teams work through every major room — living areas, kitchens, dining rooms, primary suites, guest bedrooms, bathrooms, and exterior spaces — building a complete vacation rental product from the ground up. The homes this season are the largest the show has ever featured, which means there is nowhere to hide a budget miscalculation and no room to coast on a single standout room. The whole house has to work.

Season 5 at a Glance

Garden City, SC: The Community Behind the Camera

Garden City Beach sits near the southern end of the Grand Strand, tucked between Surfside Beach to the north and the mouth of Murrells Inlet to the south. It is not Myrtle Beach — it has never tried to be — and that is exactly the point. Garden City Beach is located along the Grand Strand in South Carolina, just south of Surfside Beach and north of Murrells Inlet. Where Myrtle Beach pulls with scale and spectacle, Garden City Beach draws with something quieter: a small-town coastal atmosphere that the families who return year after year describe as irreplaceable.

The inlet meets the ocean here, so the area is a hot spot for watersports, fishing, and crabbing. The developed beach extends south into Georgetown County, ending on a narrow peninsula at the inlet’s mouth — one of those particular South Carolina coastal geographies where the water seems to come from every direction at once, and the light off the Atlantic and the inlet creates something that is genuinely difficult to photograph and even more difficult to leave.

It is the kind of place that suits a renovation competition focused on vacation rental performance, because Garden City Beach is, at its core, a vacation rental community. The beach houses along the Atlantic have been hosting families for decades. The properties know what they are for. Putting three of them under renovation pressure — with real rental economics as the final judgment — is a premise that fits the place as naturally as the tide fits the inlet.

Beyond the beach itself, Garden City offers a cluster of local landmarks that visitors return to the way they return to old friends. Sam’s Corner, an iconic diner for many visitors to the Grand Strand, has been a staple in Garden City since 1976, serving up classic hot dogs, fries, patty melts, and more all-American food that tastes extra good at the beach. The Garden City Pavilion Arcade, situated right beside the pier, offers two floors of classic and modern arcade games. And for those who venture a few minutes south, the MarshWalk in Murrells Inlet delivers some of the best waterfront dining on the entire South Carolina coast.

The Pier at Garden City: Where It All Begins

The season’s opening challenge uses the Pier at Garden City as its starting gun — a fitting choice for anyone who knows what the pier means to this community. Originally built in the early 1950s and rebuilt several times after hurricanes, the Pier at Garden City stands today as one of the most beloved landmarks on South Carolina’s coast. It stretches approximately 668 feet into the Atlantic Ocean, with a covered shelter at the far end that becomes a live music venue on summer nights, the sound of the band competing pleasantly with the sound of the ocean underneath.

In the season premiere, the three competing teams race through Garden City following clues, with the pier as the finish line. The winning team gets first pick of its beach house and assigns the other two properties to the competitors — a small early edge that can shape the strategic calculus for the entire season. It is the kind of challenge that uses the landscape rather than ignoring it, and the Pier at Garden City is exactly the right landmark for that kind of stakes-setting moment.

Whether you’re a seasoned angler, a beach lover, a family on vacation, or a local looking for a serene place to unwind, the Garden City Pier offers something magical for everyone. Walking the pier is free. Fishing requires a modest daily pass — no South Carolina fishing license needed, which matters for out-of-state visitors. The café bar opens early and stays busy late. On summer evenings, there are live bands at both ends of the pier, and the dancing starts when the sun goes down over the marsh to the west and the stars come out over the Atlantic to the east.

Viewers watching the June 1 premiere will see that pier as a television backdrop. Visitors who make it down to Garden City Beach this summer will stand on it. There is a meaningful difference between those two experiences, and only one of them involves salt air.

When and Where to Watch

Season 5 of Battle on the Beach premieres on HGTV on Monday, June 1, at 9 p.m. ET/PT. The season runs for seven episodes, with a new one airing each Monday night. The premiere is a two-hour event — a supersized opener that drops the three teams into Garden City, sends them racing to the pier, and sets the competitive tone for everything that follows.

Each episode of Battle on the Beach will stream the next day on Max beginning June 2. For those without cable, that next-day streaming window means the whole season is fully accessible — no subscription to a live TV service required, just a Max account and a couch near a screen. HGTV also maintains an active presence on Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and YouTube under the hashtag #BattleOnTheBeach for viewers who want behind-the-scenes content alongside the main episodes.

If you are planning a Grand Strand vacation this summer and want to visit the filming locations in Garden City, the timing works in your favor. The show premieres June 1, the peak summer season runs through August, and the Pier at Garden City will be doing exactly what it does every summer — fishing by day, live music by night, the Atlantic out front and the marsh behind. The cameras will be gone, but the coast will still be there, looking exactly like itself.

For those who want to stay closer to the North Myrtle Beach end of the Grand Strand, the beach communities of Crescent Beach and Windy Hill offer that same unhurried coastal rhythm — and a stay in one of our oceanfront homes or oceanfront condos puts you on the same Atlantic shore where the cameras have been rolling all spring. The Grand Strand is a long, generous coast. There is room for everyone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Information in this article is sourced from HGTV’s official press release, HGTV.com, and reporting from the Myrtle Beach Online. Premiere dates and episode schedules are current as of publication. Verify current airing information at hgtv.com.