Can a landlord charge for a pet in South Dakota, and what does the law require for an assistance animal?

Yes — no pet figure exists, but a pet deposit is a security deposit however it is named and counts inside the general deposit cap.

South Dakota has no pet-deposit statute; the word pet does not appear anywhere in the lease chapter or in the whole property title. It does not need to, because the deposit section works by function rather than by label: any deposit of money the function of which is to secure the performance of a residential rental agreement, or any part of one, is deemed to be a security deposit, and the ceiling reaches a security deposit however denominated. So a pet deposit is a security deposit, it counts inside the one-month ceiling with the ordinary deposit rather than sitting on top of it, and it carries the twenty-one-day return, the forty-five-day itemized accounting, the forfeiture of withholding rights for non-compliance and the $200 bad-faith exposure. The parties may agree on a larger total deposit where special conditions pose a danger to maintenance of the premises, and whether a pet is such a condition is an open question rather than a stated rule. There is no assistance-animal exception to any of this in South Dakota law: the state's assistance-animal sections say nothing about money at all.

Refundability: Refundable, on the ordinary terms. Within twenty-one days after the tenancy ends and the landlord has the tenant's mailing address or delivery instructions, the deposit must be returned or the landlord must give a written statement of the specific reason for withholding; withholding is limited to what is reasonably necessary to remedy defaults in rent and other funds due under the agreement and to restore the premises to their condition at the start of the tenancy, ordinary wear and tear excepted. On the tenant's request an itemized accounting is due within forty-five days of termination. A landlord who does not comply forfeits all rights to withhold any part of the deposit, and bad-faith retention or a bad-faith failure to give the statement or accounting carries punitive damages of up to $200 (section 43-32-24, as amended in 2026).

The general deposit cap it sits against: One month's rent for every deposit together: a landlord of residential premises may not demand or receive a security deposit, however denominated, in an amount or value in excess of one month's rent (section 43-32-6.1). The section has stood unamended since 1976, and the deposits page carries the cap with its return rules.

Where the rule switches off or on: The cap is escapable by agreement, and this is the part most summaries drop: a larger deposit may be agreed between the landlord and the tenant where special conditions pose a danger to maintenance of the premises (section 43-32-6.1). The statute names no such condition, and no South Dakota court has said whether keeping a pet is one, so the agreement route exists but its reach is untested.

Yes — no statute caps, authorizes or forbids pet rent or a pet fee.

No South Dakota statute mentions pet rent or a pet fee, and there is no general bar on non-refundable fees for one to run into — the lease chapter carries no prohibited-terms list, no fee cap, no reasonableness standard and no fee-disclosure duty, and it has no late-fee rule either. What the chapter does have is a functional test in the deposit section, which makes the label on a charge irrelevant: money taken to secure performance is a deposit. So the practical answer is that monthly pet rent is open, and a one-time pet fee may turn out to be a deposit inside the one-month ceiling. A municipal cap is not available either, because local rent control is preempted.

Monthly pet rent: Monthly pet rent is unregulated. Rent is the reward for the hiring, and a monthly charge paid as rent does not secure performance of the agreement, so it sits outside the deposit definition and outside the one-month ceiling. No statute caps it, authorizes it or tests it for reasonableness.

A one-time pet fee: A one-time pet fee is where the risk is. South Dakota has no rule about non-refundable fees at all, so nothing forbids one — but the deposit section works by function, and money whose function is to secure performance of the agreement is deemed a security deposit whatever the lease calls it. A non-refundable pet fee that in substance secures performance is therefore a deposit on the face of the statute: it counts inside the one-month ceiling and must be returned or accounted for, and a landlord who does not follow the return rules forfeits the right to withhold any of it. No South Dakota court has decided the point.

No — but a written-rules or mid-term-change provision would govern a pet rule the landlord adopts.

No South Dakota statute requires a lease to state a pet policy, triggers a disclosure, supplies a default when the lease is silent, limits the number or size of animals or bars a condition on keeping one. South Dakota never adopted the uniform act, so there is no written-rules section and no written-consent rule for a substantial change; the terms are left to the contract. What does govern a pet rule adopted after signing is the general modification section: in a month-to-month tenancy a landlord may change the terms on thirty days' written notice before the end of the month, and the tenant may end the lease on the first of the next month by giving notice within fifteen days of receiving that notice. There is no pet mandate for publicly financed housing either: the Housing Development Authority's rules contain no animal, pet, breed or accommodation text of any kind.

Changing the rule mid-tenancy: In a month-to-month tenancy the landlord may modify the terms of the lease by giving written notice at least thirty days before the end of the month, the change to take effect at the end of that month; the notice by itself creates the terms, rent and conditions it specifies as part of the lease if the tenant holds over. The tenant has an answer: notice of termination given to the landlord within fifteen days of receiving the modification notice ends the lease on the first day of the next month (section 43-32-13). That is the route a landlord must use to add a no-pets term or a pet charge mid-tenancy, and the fifteen-day exit is the tenant's protection against it.

Yes.

No South Dakota statute or rule restricts a residential landlord's breed, size, weight or number clause, and none protects an assistance animal from one. The word breed returns nothing across the lease chapter, the property title, the personal-rights title, the crimes title, the planning and housing title, the insurance title and both administrative articles that could carry such a rule. The assistance-animal sections contain no species, breed, size, weight or training limit, and the right to keep the animal bars a landlord from prohibiting it rather than from restricting it by type. What South Dakota does have is animal control rather than tenancy law: no local government may enact, maintain or enforce any ordinance, policy, resolution or other enactment that is specific as to the breed or perceived breed of a dog, though a local unit may still regulate in any way that applies to all dogs (section 40-34-16, in force since 2014). That is a limit on cities and counties, not on landlords.

Yes — a state statute or rule sets what a landlord may request or what a certifier must meet for an assistance animal in housing. The operative rules are statutory.

Three provisions do the work. A landlord may require reliable supporting documentation from a tenant who asserts a disability requiring, under any provision of law, that a service animal or assistance animal be allowed as an accommodation, and may not require it where the tenant's disability or disability-related need is readily apparent or already known to the landlord (section 43-32-34). Separately, no landlord may prohibit by lease or otherwise the keeping of a service animal by a person who is totally or partially physically disabled, totally or partially blind, or totally or partially deaf in an apartment or other rented or leased residential property, and a violation is a Class 2 misdemeanor (section 20-13-23.4) — note that this right does not reach a psychiatric or mental disability, and that the section's catchline still says guide dog although its text was changed to service animal in 1995. And for employment, public accommodation, public service, education and housing alike, good faith efforts must be made to reasonably accommodate a person with a disability unless the accommodation would impose undue hardship (section 20-13-23.7) — one sentence, which is the whole of South Dakota's statutory accommodation duty. The remedies are real: in a civil action elected in place of a Human Relations Commission hearing, a court or jury may award compensatory damages and any injunctive order including affirmative action, punitive damages are available for a violation of either the right to keep the animal or the accommodation duty, and attorney's fees and costs may go to the prevailing party in housing matters (section 20-13-35.1). The election must be made within twenty days of the notice requiring an answer to the charge, and the action filed within a year.

Who it binds: Three reaches that do not line up. The documentation sections bind every landlord of a rental dwelling unit with no exemption of any kind: the lease chapter applies in every hiring of residential premises and carries no owner-occupied, unit-count or small-landlord carve-out anywhere. The right to keep the animal binds every landlord too, but it protects a narrower set of tenants — a person totally or partially physically disabled, totally or partially blind, or totally or partially deaf — and does not reach a psychiatric or mental disability, even though the public-accommodation section beside it was amended in 2020 to add exactly that. The general housing-discrimination provisions are the only ones with an owner exemption, and it is narrower than the federal one: their first, second and fourth subdivisions do not apply to rooms or units in a dwelling containing living quarters for no more than two families living independently where the owner lives in one of them, with the advertising subdivision left in and separate exclusions for school dormitories and recognized fraternity or sorority housing. So in an owner-occupied duplex the documentation statute and the right to keep the animal still bind while the general discrimination duty does not, and a tenant with a psychiatric disability relies on the documentation statute and federal law rather than on the state right.

South Dakota regulates the document rather than the conversation: it sets no list of permitted questions and no two-question rule. A landlord may require reliable supporting documentation where the tenant asserts a disability requiring, under any provision of law, that a service animal or assistance animal be allowed as an accommodation (section 43-32-34). The landlord may not require it where the tenant's disability or the disability-related need for the animal is readily apparent or already known — either one being apparent or known switches the request off. The documentation itself must confirm two things: the tenant's disability, and the relationship between that disability and the need for the requested accommodation (section 43-32-35).

The law tests the certifier's conduct before issuing.

Who may certify: A licensed health care provider — no list of license types, no profession named and no requirement that the provider be licensed in South Dakota. The one qualifier is about what the provider does: the documentation must originate from a licensed health care provider who does not operate in this state solely to provide certification for service or assistance animals (section 43-32-35). Two words carry that test, in this state and solely, so it measures the provider's South Dakota activity and lets through any provider who does something else here. Nothing in the statute lets a landlord verify the license, and nothing says what happens if the documentation comes from a provider who fails the test.

South Dakota's documentation regime is two sentences long, and what it leaves out matters as much as what it says. A landlord may ask for reliable supporting documentation, but not where the disability or the need for the animal is readily apparent or already known. The document must confirm the disability and the connection between the disability and the animal, and it must come from a licensed health care provider who does not operate in this state solely to provide certification for service or assistance animals — an anti-mill test aimed at what the provider does rather than at how long the provider has known the tenant. There is no minimum length for a treatment relationship, despite what many out-of-state summaries say; no rule about how recent the document must be and no annual re-evaluation; no exclusion of an online certificate or registry; no bar on a landlord requiring its own form; no bar on a landlord demanding medical records; no telehealth rule either way; no power to verify the document; and no deadline, in writing or otherwise, for a landlord to answer a request. The statute also never says the landlord may deny a request for want of documentation — it says only what may be required and what must be in it. South Dakota places no duty on the person who writes the letter and no licensing consequence on one: the whole professions and occupations title carries no assistance-animal provision. A 2026 bill would have filled most of these gaps and it died in committee, so none of it is law.

Under state law, yes — no state text bars a charge for an assistance animal; the federal rules alone govern it.

No South Dakota statute bars a landlord from charging a pet deposit, a pet fee or pet rent for an assistance animal. The four assistance-animal sections in the lease chapter contain no money word at all, and the right to keep the animal bars a landlord from prohibiting it, which is a different thing from charging for it. There is one extra-charge bar in South Dakota law and it does not reach a tenancy: a person with a disability, and a service-animal trainer, may be accompanied by a service animal without being required to pay an extra charge in any of the places the Human Relations Act lists — hotels, lodging places, places of public accommodation, amusement or resort, and other places to which the general public is invited. Both limbs of that sentence carry the same qualifier, and neither names rental or residential housing; the section was split from the housing right in 1995 and nothing carries its charge bar across. The same section puts damage liability on the handler in those places, and there is no parallel sentence for a tenancy, so in a rental the ordinary deposit rule governs damage. What stops a charge for an assistance animal in most South Dakota tenancies is therefore the federal rules, not state law.

An offense or sanction that reaches a misrepresentation made to obtain housing: a ground for eviction and a civil penalty, reaching the person claiming the animal. Penalty terms: a damage fee not to exceed $1,000.

South Dakota's misrepresentation rule is civil and it sits in the lease chapter. Where a person is found to have knowingly made a false claim of having a disability that requires the use of a service animal or assistance animal, or to have knowingly provided fraudulent supporting documentation for such a claim, the landlord may evict, and the landlord is entitled to a damage fee of up to $1,000 from a tenant who provides fraudulent disability documentation (section 43-32-36). Knowingly is the mental element and it appears twice; no warning is required first. The offense reaches the tenant only. A separate criminal offense was created in 2026 and it does not reach housing: intentionally misrepresenting an animal as a service animal in a place of public accommodation, to obtain rights the person knows they are not entitled to, is a Class 2 misdemeanor, and that section uses the narrow trained-dog definition rather than the broad housing one (section 22-35-9). Two other animal offenses exist — interfering with a law-enforcement support animal, and maliciously injuring or harassing a service animal accompanying a person with a disability — and neither reaches a landlord or a tenant's claim.

Where the words leave the reach open: The sentence has two triggers but the fee clause restates only one of them. Eviction follows where the person is found to have knowingly made a false claim of having a disability requiring the animal or to have knowingly provided fraudulent supporting documentation; the damage fee is then made payable if the tenant provides fraudulent disability documentation. On the text the fee attaches to the documentation branch only, while eviction is available on either. No South Dakota court has construed it in the eight years since enactment, and a 2026 bill that would have split the sentence in two died in committee, which suggests the legislature read it the same way. The two branches are stated separately here rather than added together.

Who enforces it: Both consequences are civil and both run through the court hearing the eviction or the fee claim — the statute says the person is found to have made the claim without saying who finds it. There is no criminal penalty for misrepresentation in housing, no licensing consequence, and no route against the person who wrote the documentation: South Dakota has no provider branch anywhere in its law. On the other side, a tenant denied an assistance animal has a real remedy in the Human Relations Act, including compensatory and punitive damages and attorney's fees in housing matters.

In part — state law preempts the kinds of local rule named as barred, and any power named is one state law grants.

South Dakota preempts two things and leaves pets in rental housing alone. No local government may enact, maintain or enforce anything specific as to the breed or perceived breed of a dog, so no South Dakota city may pass a breed-specific ordinance, although a rule that applies to all dogs is still open to it. And no local governmental unit may enforce an enactment that would have the effect of controlling the amount of rent charged for private residential property, which puts a municipal cap on pet rent in tension with state law, while a municipal cap on a pet deposit is a different question the statute does not reach. What municipalities keep is ordinary animal control: regulating dogs and animals running at large, pounds, impoundment and dog licenses. Nothing in South Dakota law authorizes or forbids a municipal ordinance about pet deposits, pet fees or pet policies in tenancies, and no South Dakota municipality has one. There is no fair-housing devolution either: the Human Relations Act has no clause preserving or devolving local ordinances, and enforcement sits with the state commission and the courts.

Breed-specific local animal-control rules barred: No local government may enact, maintain or enforce any ordinance, policy, resolution or other enactment that is specific as to the breed or perceived breed of a dog, though the section does not impair a local unit's right to enact or enforce any form of regulation that applies to all dogs. In force since 2014. The definition of local government it uses is borrowed from a section whose own words scope it to the rent-control provision, so both sections are cited here rather than paraphrased. Text: SDCL § 40-34-16 · with § 6-1-12 (definition).

Local rent control barred: No local governmental unit may enact, maintain or enforce any ordinance, resolution or other enactment that would have the effect of controlling the amount of rent charged for leasing private residential property, though a local unit may still manage and control residential property in which it has a property interest. A municipal cap on pet rent is in tension with that; a municipal cap on a pet deposit is not. Text: SDCL § 6-1-13.

Localities may regulate the keeping or licensing of animals: Every municipality has power to regulate or prohibit the running at large of dogs, animals and poultry, to establish pounds, appoint poundmasters and regulate the impounding of animals, and to impose a tax or license on dogs running at large. That is the residual municipal power over animals, and the breed preemption cuts it back for anything breed-specific. Text: SDCL § 9-29-12.