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

Verified July 9, 2026 All Indiana topics →

Indiana requires 'reasonable' written or oral notice before a landlord enters a rental — no fixed number of hours — and entry may occur only at reasonable times, for reasons the tenant cannot unreasonably refuse: inspections, necessary or agreed repairs and improvements, supplying services, or showing the unit to buyers, lenders, contractors, or prospective tenants.

No notice at all is required in an emergency that threatens the safety of the occupants or the landlord's property, and no tenant consent is needed when the landlord enters under a court order or after the tenant has abandoned or surrendered the unit. The statute pairs the entry right with two tenant protections that summaries often drop: a landlord may not abuse the right of entry or use it to harass the tenant, and none of these rules can be waived by lease — a waiver of the chapter is void. The 24- or 48-hour figures and '8 a.m. to 5 p.m. business hours' windows that appear on many Indiana landlord sites are practice conventions or judicial glosses, not statutory text.

Indiana entry notice at a glance

Advance notice required	No fixed statutory period (see notice standard)
Notice standard	Reasonable notice, written OR oral: a landlord 'shall give a tenant reasonable written or oral notice of the landlord's intent to enter the dwelling unit' and 'may enter a tenant's dwelling unit only at reasonable times' (IC 32-31-5-6(g)(2)-(3)). No fixed hour period exists in the statute.
Permitted reasons	The tenant may not unreasonably withhold consent for the landlord to: inspect the dwelling unit; make necessary or agreed repairs, decorations, alterations, or improvements; supply necessary or agreed services; or exhibit the unit to prospective or actual purchasers, mortgagees, tenants, workers, or contractors (IC 32-31-5-6(e)).
Emergency exception	Yes
Time-of-day restrictions	Entry only 'at reasonable times' (32-31-5-6(g)(3)); the statute fixes no clock hours.

Notes and caveats

notice_hours is null per the reasonable-notice convention (contrast AZ's statutory 2 days): the statutory words are 'reasonable written or oral notice' — encode nothing firmer. Traps debunked: (1) many secondary sources state a flat 24-hour (or 48-hour) requirement, and at least one adds 'normal business hours, typically 8 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays' — none of that appears in IC 32-31-5-6, whose full text was read verbatim on two hosts this session; 24 hours is a defensible-practice gloss, not law. (2) Oral notice expressly suffices — unusual, and silently upgraded to 'written' by some checklists. Structure notes: the emergency/court-order/abandonment carve-outs are subsection (f); the notice-and-reasonable-times duties plus the anti-harassment rule are subsection (g) (added by P.L.115-2007); abandonment is defined at (b) (unpaid rent plus circumstances indicating surrender, and a lease may not define it differently). Scope: chapter 5 applies only to rental agreements entered into or renewed after June 30, 1999, and waiver is void (32-31-5-1(c)) — unlike the 30-day modification default in 5-4, the entry rules contain no 'unless the lease provides otherwise' escape. 'Dwelling unit' covers apartments, boarding/rooming house units, manufactured homes and their spaces, and single- or two-family dwellings (32-31-5-3), subject to the article-wide exclusions in IC 32-31-2.9-4 (hotels/motels, institutional, employer-tied, fraternal, condo-owner, and agricultural occupancies).

Statute citations

IC 32-31-5-6 (e)-(g) Official source
IC 32-31-5-1 (a), (c) Official source
IC 32-31-5-6 (mirror) (e)-(g) Unofficial mirror

How this record was verified: Indiana's official code viewer (iga.in.gov) is JavaScript-rendered and returns no statutory text to non-browser clients, so text was verified on two independent code mirrors and reconciled verbatim: FindLaw (codes.findlaw.com, 'current as of January 01, 2026') and Justia's archived official-text PDFs of IC 32-31 chapters 1, 3, and 5 (statecodesfiles.justia.com, 2013 edition, carrying the official 'As added by P.L.' history lines). Sections double-read across both hosts with figures matching verbatim: IC 32-31-3-12, 32-31-3-14, 32-31-3-15, 32-31-3-16 (45-day deadline, forfeiture rule, attorney fees), 32-31-5-4 (30-day modification notice), 32-31-5-6 (entry, all subsections), 32-31-1-1, 32-31-1-2, and 32-31-1-4 (termination-notice periods); 32-31-3-12/-14/-15/-16 were additionally read on law.onecle.com. IC 32-31-1-20 (preemption) was read verbatim on FindLaw (current through Jan. 1, 2026) and in the pre-amendment 2013 official text; subsection (c)'s enactment was confirmed against the SEA 148-2020 bill record and contemporaneous coverage of the February 17, 2021 veto override (assigned P.L. 168) — a cross-host read of the CURRENT (c) text was not obtainable this session (Justia, Casetext, LegiScan, LawServer, and archive.org all blocked automated fetches) and is a carry-forward. Scope sections IC 32-31-2.9-1/-3/-4, 32-31-5-1, and 32-31-5-3 read on FindLaw/2013 PDF. 2025-2026 session sweeps (IGA subject list 'Landlords and Tenants', LegiScan) on 2026-07-09 found no enacted change to any encoded field; 2026 bills SB 127 and HB 1435 died at the session's March 2026 sine die adjournment, and HEA 1001-2026 (signed) addresses zoning/permitting only.