How much notice must a landlord give before entering in Arkansas?

Verified July 10, 2026 All Arkansas topics →

Pending legislation — not yet law. The rules on this page reflect current law only. The following bill would change it if enacted:

SB 501 (2025 RS) — 'Tenant Possessions Recovery Act' — Would have required a landlord to give a tenant at least 14 days' written notice before the scheduled repossession date after a court issues a writ of possession, and created a process for tenants to recover personal possessions left behind. Adjacent to, not within, the four v1 topics, but it was the session's principal tenant-side bill.Status: Dead. Filed 2025-03-18, amended and re-referred to Senate Judiciary 2025-03-20, died in committee at the 2025-05-05 sine die adjournment. The 2026 fiscal session was appropriations-only; watch for a refile in the 2027 regular session (Arkansas holds regular sessions in odd years). (checked 2026-07-10).

Arkansas requires no advance notice — not 24 hours, not 'reasonable notice,' nothing — before a landlord enters a rental unit: the state's access statute simply forbids the tenant from unreasonably withholding consent to entry for inspections, repairs, services, showings, or investigations of suspected lease violations or criminal activity.

The statute is written entirely as a tenant duty, and its enforcement runs one way: a tenant who refuses lawful access faces an injunction (no bond required), lease termination, actual damages, and attorney's fees, while no statute gives a tenant any remedy against abusive or excessive entry — Arkansas law contains no anti-harassment clause, no time-of-day limit, and no emergency-entry provision to bound the landlord's side. Tenants are also barred from changing the locks without the landlord's permission. A tenant's only protections are the word 'unreasonably,' whatever notice the lease itself promises, and common-law trespass principles, so lease drafting carries the entire load in Arkansas.

Arkansas entry notice at a glance

Advance notice required	No fixed statutory period (see notice standard)
Notice standard	No notice requirement exists — Arkansas DOES have an entry statute, but it is a tenant-obligation consent statute with no notice period: A.C.A. 18-17-602(a) provides that a tenant 'shall not unreasonably withhold consent' to landlord entry for the listed purposes. It contains no advance-notice requirement of any length, no 'reasonable times' limitation, no anti-harassment clause, and no emergency-entry provision. Statewide (2007 act scope), subject only to the 18-17-202 exclusions.
Permitted reasons	Purposes for which the tenant may not unreasonably withhold consent (18-17-602(a)): inspect the premises; make necessary or agreed repairs, decorations, alterations, or improvements; supply necessary or agreed services; investigate possible rule or lease violations; investigate possible criminal activity; or exhibit the unit to prospective or actual purchasers, mortgagees, tenants, workers, or contractors. The investigation purposes are broader than the URLTA-model lists in neighboring states. Separately, 18-17-602(b) bars the TENANT from changing locks without the landlord's permission, and 18-17-702(a) lets the landlord enter to cure the tenant's own health/safety failures after 14 days' written notice (or 'as promptly as conditions require' in an emergency) at the tenant's cost.
Emergency exception	Not addressed by statute
Time-of-day restrictions	Not addressed by statute

Notes and caveats

notice_hours is null because no notice period exists in any Arkansas statute — national aggregators that normalize Arkansas to '24 hours' are wrong (same class of error as the TN 24-hour overstatement, but with even less textual basis). Resolution of the batch lead: 'AR likely has no entry statute' was wrong as phrased — 18-17-602 exists — but right in effect: it grants tenants no notice protection at all. emergency_exception is null rather than true or false: no general statutory emergency-entry right exists (asserting one would overstate the law), but two narrow statutory routes assume emergency entry — 18-17-702(a) (curing the tenant's own health/safety noncompliance 'as promptly as conditions require in case of emergency') and 18-17-502(c)(2)(A) (2021: a landlord is DEEMED COMPLIANT with the implied habitability standards if a defect went unfixed 'because the tenant refused the landlord entry'). time_of_day_restrictions is null — 18-17-602 omits even the 'at reasonable times' phrase found in URLTA states. Title trap documented: 18-17-705 was enacted in 2007 titled 'Landlord and tenant remedies for abuse of access,' but its body has only ever granted LANDLORD remedies; the current code retitles it 'Landlord remedies for refusal of access to rental property,' and older mirrors carrying the 2007 title mislead readers into inferring a tenant remedy. Both sections unamended since Acts 2007, No. 1004.

Statute citations

A.C.A. § 18-17-602 (Access; read three times — FindLaw, full-chapter mirror PDF, Justia 2024 ed. — all matched; unamended since Acts 2007, No. 1004) (a)-(b) Unofficial mirror
A.C.A. § 18-17-705 (Landlord remedies for refusal of access — injunction without bond, termination, actual damages, attorney's fees; NO tenant remedy exists; read twice, fetches matched) (a)-(b) Unofficial mirror
A.C.A. § 18-17-602 (current-code mirror, current through 2024-03-28) (a) Unofficial mirror

How this record was verified: Arkansas's official code is published via a LexisNexis portal without stable deep links (GA/TN-class sourcing), so verification pairs two independent current-code mirrors with official arkleg.state.ar.us session-law PDFs: every load-bearing section (A.C.A. 18-16-303, 18-16-304, 18-16-305, 18-16-306, 18-17-201, 18-17-202, 18-17-401, 18-17-602, 18-17-704, 18-17-705, 14-16-601) was read verbatim on FindLaw (current through 2024-03-28) and independently re-read on the Justia 2024 Arkansas Code edition (via browser; Justia returned 403 to direct fetches), with all reads matching; chapter 18-17 was additionally read in FULL from a mirrored chapter PDF for negative checks (no late-fee, rent-increase, or entry-notice provision exists). Every amendment was traced to the official act text read from arkleg PDFs: Act 559 of 2009 (deposit return 30->60 days; 18-17-501 rewritten to defer to 18-16-301 et seq.), Act 1052 of 2021 (18-17-502 habitability, context), and Act 459 of 2025 (preemption expanded to application fees and deposits). Corroborated against the Arkansas Attorney General's landlord-tenant page (official state source) and Legal Aid of Arkansas. 2025 regular session swept for landlord-tenant acts (only Act 459 touches an encoded field; SB 501 died in committee 2025-05-05 per the official arkleg bill page); the 2026 fiscal session was appropriations-only.