Free South Dakota Residential Lease Agreement

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A configurable South Dakota residential lease agreement that generates a signable multi-page PDF. Built to SDCL chapters 43-32, 21-16 and 43-8 — including the deposit return that became twenty-one days on 1 July 2026, the one-month ceiling that counts every deposit however denominated, and the statutory notice to quit South Dakota repealed in 2024.

South Dakota SDCL ch. 43-32 21-Day Deposit Return Free PDF 2026 Edition

A South Dakota residential lease agreement is the written contract governed by SDCL chapter 43-32, with the eviction procedure in chapter 21-16 and the estate-at-will notice in chapter 43-8. South Dakota never adopted the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act, so its rules sit in an old general leasing chapter descended from the 1877 Civil Code and amended piecemeal ever since — and that history is exactly why generic templates get South Dakota wrong. Two changes in the last two legislative sessions have left almost every South Dakota lease template in circulation stating law that is no longer in force. Since 1 July 2026 the security deposit must be returned or accounted for within twenty-one days, not fourteen. Since 1 July 2024 there has been no statutory notice to quit at all, because the section that required it was repealed outright. On top of those, the one-month deposit ceiling reaches every deposit however denominated, the entry notice must carry four specific things and its window must fall within normal business hours, and the one month’s rent everybody quotes as a repair-and-deduct cap is not a cap at all. The generator below builds a lease that reflects each of those rules as the statute actually reads, verified section by section against the South Dakota Legislature’s own published text on 6 August 2026.

Complete the fields below to generate a South Dakota residential lease agreement as a signable multi-page PDF. Every field you fill is written into the document, including the utility allocations, the running total of every deposit against the statutory ceiling, the entry protocol you elect under SDCL 43-32-32, the termination regime you name, and each disclosure you check — and the generated lease cites the controlling South Dakota section at each point. Before you hand keys to anyone, run proper tenant screening; the lease governs the relationship, screening decides whether you want it. Pair the signed lease with a South Dakota move-in / move-out checklist, because SDCL 43-32-24 measures every lawful deduction against “their condition at the commencement of the tenancy” and South Dakota gives you no statutory condition statement to lean on.

Three enacted changes, and they are the reason almost every South Dakota lease template in circulation is now wrong. South Dakota acts that carry no emergency clause take effect on the first day of July after passage, under SDCL 2-14-16, so each of these has a hard date.

1 July 2026 — the deposit return became twenty-one days. 2026 Senate Bill 4 became chapter 179 of the 2026 Session Laws. Its enrolled text amends SDCL 43-32-24 and the Legislative Research Council’s own 2026 Title Summaries memorandum describes it in one line: it “increases, from fourteen days to twenty-one days, the time within which a landlord must return a tenant’s security deposit after termination of a tenancy.” The bill was signed by the Governor on 12 February 2026, carried no emergency clause, and passed both chambers on the consent calendar without amendment. Every page currently ranking for this query still says fourteen days or two weeks.

1 July 2024 — the statutory notice to quit was repealed outright. 2024 Senate Bill 90 became chapter 75 of the 2024 Session Laws. Section 1 of that act reads, in full, “That § 21-16-2 be REPEALED.” Section 2 amended SDCL 21-16-7 to add a thirty-day publication alternative to the five-day appearance rule. The act was signed on 26 March 2024. SDCL 21-16-2 still resolves on the Legislature’s own site, where the entire text of the section now reads “Repealed.” A South Dakota landlord no longer owes any statutory pre-suit notice before commencing a forcible entry and detainer action.

1 July 2024 — the estate-at-will notice was reduced to fifteen days, with a new military exception. 2024 Senate Bill 89 became chapter 178 of the 2024 Session Laws and was signed the same day. SDCL 43-8-8 now requires the landlord’s notice to terminate a residential estate at will to specify a period of not less than fifteen days, and the same act created a protection that appears on no template we could find: where the tenancy at will is the residence of a tenant on active military service, or where a person on active military service is an immediate family member of the tenant, the tenant is entitled to two months’ notice — unless the tenant has engaged in sustained conduct that is disruptive, illegal, destructive or negligent toward the maintenance of the property or amounts to a material breach of the implied lease conditions, or unless the landlord has sold the property or it has passed to the landlord’s estate. For that section, an immediate family member is a spouse or a minor child. The same act moved commercial estates at will into a brand-new SDCL 43-8-8.1, where the notice period is one month.

A note on how we know the period was reduced. South Dakota enrolled acts restate the whole amended section and carry no strike-through or other amendment markup, so an enrolled act shows what a section now says and never what it used to say. That the fifteen days is current law we read directly, in both the codified section and the enrolled act. That it represents a reduction we take from the bill’s own title — “An Act to reduce the notice requirement period to terminate a tenancy at will” — and from chapter 178 of 2024 being the most recent entry in the section’s source line. We have not seen the previous figure struck, so we do not state one here.

Also 1 July 2026, and worth knowing: 2026 House Bill 1014, chapter 93 of the 2026 Session Laws, amended SDCL 16-2-58.2 so that the twenty-five dollar “commission on equal access to our courts” surcharge otherwise payable by a responding party on an answer may not be collected in any civil action or proceeding for forcible entry and detainer. It removes a real cost barrier to a South Dakota tenant filing an answer in an eviction, and it appears on none of the ranking pages.

Two 2026 acts did change the definition of “service animal” in South Dakota law, and their effect on a lease is subtler than it looks. Senate Bill 81 amended SDCL 40-1-38, the offence of injuring or harassing a service animal, and Senate Bill 82 added a new section to SDCL chapter 22-35 creating an offence of misrepresenting an animal as a service animal in a place of public accommodation. Both were signed on 9 March 2026, and both define a service animal narrowly as a dog trained to do work or perform tasks, adding expressly that “the crime deterrent effects of a dog’s presence and the provision of emotional support, well-being, comfort, or companionship do not constitute work or tasks.” Neither act touched chapter 43-32. South Dakota therefore now carries two different statutory definitions of the same phrase, and the one that governs a tenancy is still the broad one in SDCL 43-32-33.

Beyond those, nothing. The Legislative Research Council publishes a per-session memorandum stating, title by title, every act codified in each title of the Codified Laws — and saying so expressly where none was. Read for SDCL Title 43 and Title 21 across both the 2025 and 2026 sessions, it confirms that no 2025 act touched chapter 43-32 or chapter 21-16 at all, and that the only 2026 acts in Title 43 besides Senate Bill 4 concern court modification of conveyance restrictions and foreign ownership of agricultural land.

South Dakota recognises the standard range of residential arrangements, and the type matters more here than in most states because it decides which of three termination regimes applies.

A fixed-term lease runs for a stated period and, under SDCL 43-32-22, terminates by the expiration of the agreed term. No notice is needed to end it and no South Dakota statute requires a landlord to announce an intention not to renew. A month-to-month tenancy renews each month; where the parties never specified a term at all, SDCL 43-32-15 deems the hiring renewed unless a party gives notice at least as long before expiry as the term of the hiring itself, not exceeding one month. A week-to-week tenancy runs on the same rule and therefore takes one week’s notice. An estate at will — a tenancy with no fixed term terminable at either party’s pleasure — is governed instead by SDCL 43-8-8 and takes not less than fifteen days from the landlord.

Where the parties are silent about length, South Dakota does not default to month-to-month, whatever the ranking guides say. SDCL 43-32-3 provides that “a hiring of real property, other than lodgings in places where there is no usage on the subject, is presumed to be for one year from its commencement unless otherwise expressed in the hiring.” The month-to-month answer comes from a different section, SDCL 43-32-4, which applies to lodgings: a hiring of lodgings for an unspecified term is presumed to be for the length of time the parties adopt for estimating the rent, so a weekly rate presumes a week, and only “in the absence of any agreement respecting the length of time of the rent” is the hiring presumed monthly. Getting that backwards changes how long a tenant may stay and what notice ends the arrangement.

South Dakota also caps how long a lease may run. Under SDCL 43-32-2, no lease or grant of agricultural land reserving any rent or service for longer than twenty years is valid, and no lease or grant of any municipal lot reserving rent or service for longer than ninety-nine years is valid. And under SDCL 43-32-5, no agreement for the leasing of real property for a period longer than one year is valid unless it, or a note or memorandum of it, is in writing signed by the lessor or the lessor’s agent authorised in writing. Note whose signature the section names. The general statute of frauds in SDCL 53-8-2(3) approaches the same ground from the other direction, requiring a writing subscribed by the party to be charged.

One month’s rent — and the ceiling counts every deposit you take, whatever you call it. SDCL 43-32-6.1 is two sentences and most summaries quote only the second.

That first sentence is the whole game. It is a deeming rule: it does not ask what you called the money, it asks what the money does. If its function is to secure performance of the rental agreement or any part of it, it is a security deposit. Combine that with “however denominated” in the second sentence and the consequence is direct — a pet deposit, a cleaning deposit, a key deposit, a redecoration deposit and last month’s rent held as security all sit inside the same single month’s rent. South Dakota has no separate pet-deposit allowance, and it has no furnished or unfurnished tier. A landlord who takes one month as a security deposit and then adds a pet deposit on top has almost certainly breached the section, however the paperwork describes the second payment. That is why the builder above puts each of them in its own field and prints the running total on the face of the lease.

The exception is narrow and it has two conditions, both of which the ranking pages soften. The larger deposit must be agreed upon between the lessor and the lessee, and there must be special conditions posing a danger to maintenance of the premises. Notice what that is not. It is not the tenant’s credit score, criminal history or income. It is not the mere fact of keeping a pet, though a specific animal’s characteristics might in principle be a special condition. And it is not, as the deepest ranking page renders it, a condition where “the tenant poses a danger to the maintenance of the premises” — the statute speaks of conditions, not of the tenant. If you rely on the exception, write the special condition into the lease, which is what the builder does.

Twenty-one days — and the clock starts on two events, not on move-out. This is the single most valuable correction on this page, because every competing South Dakota resource still states the old figure.

SDCL 43-32-24 requires every lessor of residential premises, “within twenty-one days after the termination of the tenancy and receipt of the tenant’s mailing address or delivery instructions,” either to return the security deposit or to furnish the tenant a written statement showing the specific reason for withholding the deposit or any portion of it. Read that structure carefully, because two things follow that the summaries miss.

First, it is one deadline with two ways of satisfying it, not a return deadline plus a separate statement deadline. A landlord who intends to withhold satisfies the section by getting a written statement of the specific reason out within the twenty-one days; a landlord who intends to return everything satisfies it by returning the money.

Second, the clock is conjunctive. It runs from the termination of the tenancy and from receipt of the tenant’s mailing address or delivery instructions. A tenant who moves out and disappears without leaving an address has not started the clock. Equally, a landlord who receives a forwarding address a fortnight after move-out has twenty-one days from that later event. Every ranking page states the deadline as running from the end of the tenancy alone, and one states it as running from receipt of the address alone; the statute requires both.

There is then a second, later, conditional document. Within forty-five days after termination of the tenancy, upon request of the lessee, the lessor must provide the lessee with an itemized accounting of any deposit withheld. It is triggered by the tenant asking for it, it runs to a longer period, and it is not a substitute for the written statement of the specific reason that is due inside the twenty-one days. Conflating the two is how the deepest ranking page ends up printing “landlords have 45 days to return deposits” in its own overview box while its security deposit chapter says fourteen.

The landlord forfeits the right to keep any of it — and bad faith adds a separate, small penalty on top. SDCL 43-32-24 carries two distinct sanctions and they are constantly merged.

The first is automatic: “Any lessor of residential premises who fails to comply with this section forfeits all rights to withhold any portion of the deposit.” That consequence follows from non-compliance itself. It does not require bad faith, it does not require intent, and it does not scale with how late the landlord was. Miss the twenty-one days, or send a statement that does not show the specific reason, and the right to retain a single dollar is gone regardless of how much damage the tenant actually did. In practical terms this is a far heavier sanction than the second one, and it is the sanction the rankers almost never lead with.

The second is discretionary and capped: “The bad faith retention of a deposit, or any po