How much notice must a landlord give before entering in South Dakota?

Verified July 11, 2026 All South Dakota topics →

South Dakota requires landlords to give tenants reasonable notice before entering a rental unit, and 24 hours' written notice is presumed reasonable — but the 24-hour figure is a rebuttable presumption, not a flat statutory minimum, and the lease can set mutually agreed alternate notification methods or entry times.

Except in an emergency or when notice is impracticable, the landlord may enter only at reasonable times, and the notice itself has required contents that most one-line summaries miss: it must state the date or dates of entry, an entry window during normal business hours, the purpose of the entry, and a way for the tenant to ask to reschedule. The statute (SDCL 43-32-32, enacted in 2014) does not restrict what purposes justify entry — it only requires that the purpose be disclosed. Charts that render South Dakota simply as a '24-hour notice state' overstate the rule: 24 hours' written notice is the safe-harbor presumption of reasonableness, not an absolute floor or ceiling.

South Dakota entry notice at a glance

Advance notice required	No fixed statutory period (see notice standard)
Notice standard	Reasonable notice, with a statutory presumption: except in an emergency or if it is impracticable to do so, the landlord or agent must give reasonable notice of intent to enter and may enter only at reasonable times; 'Twenty-four hours written notice is presumed to be a reasonable notice unless alternate methods of notification or times for entry are mutually agreed upon between the landlord and tenant in the lease' (SDCL 43-32-32). The notice must specify the date or dates of entry, a period of time during normal business hours for entry, the purpose of the intended entry, and a means by which the tenant may request to reschedule.
Permitted reasons	No enumerated list of permitted entry purposes — the statute regulates the notice, not the reasons, and simply requires that the notice state the purpose of the intended entry. No other section of ch. 43-32 addresses entry (verified by full-chapter sweep).
Emergency exception	Yes
Time-of-day restrictions	Entry only at 'reasonable times,' and the notice must offer an entry window falling within normal business hours — unless the lease sets mutually agreed alternate times.

Notes and caveats

notice_hours null per the dataset's presumed-reasonable convention (OH/ME precedent): the statute's operative command is 'reasonable notice,' with 24 hours' WRITTEN notice only 'presumed to be a reasonable notice,' and even that presumption yields to mutually agreed lease terms — render as 'reasonable notice (24 hours written presumed reasonable),' not as a bare '24 hours.' Vintage correction: the section is SL 2014, ch 191, § 4 (2014, not 2016 as some leads suggest); it has never been amended. The emergency valve is double-barreled — 'in case of an emergency OR if it is impracticable' — broader than a pure emergency exception (same URLTA-style phrasing as Montana's 70-24-312). Required notice CONTENTS (dates, business-hours window, purpose, rescheduling channel) are unusual among presumed-reasonable states and are load-bearing for notice-template builders. No statutory remedy section pairs with 43-32-32; an entry violation sounds in general lease/tort remedies. Verified negative on any other entry statute: full sweep of ch. 43-32 section index and text, run twice.

Statute citations

SDCL 43-32-32 Official source

How this record was verified: Direct read of statute text served by the official South Dakota Legislature site (sdlegislature.gov, SDLRC codified laws): the complete text of every section of SDCL chapter 43-32 (43-32-1 through 43-32-37, including all decimal sections and the repealed 43-32-7) read via the site's chapter endpoint, with every load-bearing section (43-32-6.1, 43-32-24, 43-32-13, 43-32-32, 43-32-12, 43-32-15) fetched a second, independent time via the per-section endpoint — all figures matched verbatim across reads (one month's rent cap; twenty-one days / forty-five days deposit clocks; $200 punitive ceiling; thirty-day modification notice with fifteen-day tenant termination right; twenty-four-hour written-notice entry presumption). SDCL 6-1-13 and 6-1-12 (rent-control preemption) double-read the same way. The 2026 amendment to 43-32-24 additionally pinned character-for-character from the official enrolled 2026 SB 4 (SL 2026, ch 179) and its introduced strike/underline version via the Legislature's document API; bill history from the official action log (signed by the Governor 2026-02-12; no effective-date clause, so effective 2026-07-01 under SDCL 2-14-16, read from the official site). Session sweeps run against the official bill lists: 2026 regular session (666 bills — SB 4 enacted and incorporated; HB 1231 on assistance-animal documentation tabled 2026-02-11, dead), 2025 regular session (571 bills — no landlord-tenant bills), 2025 special session (2 bills, corrections real estate only). Negative findings (no deposit interest or separate-account rule, no late-fee statute or grace period, no enumerated entry-reasons list) verified against the full chapter text in both reads. Note: sdlegislature.gov statute pages are JavaScript-rendered, but all text was read from the same official host's JSON/HTML API endpoints — no mirrors were needed or used.