South Dakota Concealed Carry Permit

South Dakota state law does not prohibit an individual from building or assembling a firearm for personal use, and imposes NO state serialization, marking, or registration requirement on a self-made firearm. This conclusion rests on the absence of any prohibition rather than on an affirmative authorizing statute: a full scan of SDCL ch. 22-14 (Unlawful Use of Weapons) and ch. 23-7 (Firearms Control) found no provision addressing privately made, homemade, 3D-printed, or unserialized firearms, and no manufacturing license requirement for personal (non-commercial) making. The only serial-number offense is SDCL 22-14-5: "Any person who possesses any firearm on which the MANUFACTURER'S serial number has been changed, altered, removed, or obliterated is guilty of a Class 6 felony" (exception for a person who has applied for a new number under SDCL 23-7-43, under which the DCI director will engrave or stamp a new serial number on request). By its terms that statute reaches the defacement of an existing manufacturer's serial number, not the absence of a serial number on a firearm that was never commercially manufactured. There is also no state firearms registry - SDCL 23-7-8.6 bars any state agency or political subdivision from keeping "any list, record, or registry of privately owned firearms" or of their owners. Local governments are preempted from restricting the "manufacture" of firearms (SDCL 7-18A-36, 8-5-13, 9-19-20). IMPORTANT LIMITS: (1) Making an NFA-type "controlled weapon" is a Class 6 felony under SDCL 22-14-6 unless the maker "has a federal license issued pursuant to law for the weapon or has registered the weapon with the proper federal authority pursuant to law" - so a home-built machine gun or short shotgun without federal approval (ATF Form 1) is a South Dakota felony. As amended by SL 2026, ch 96, SDCL 22-1-2(8) now defines "controlled weapon" as "a machine gun and short shotgun, but does not include a firearm silencer," so firearm silencers are no longer a controlled weapon under South Dakota law (federal NFA requirements are unaffected). (2) Independent federal law still governs: an unlicensed person may generally make a firearm for personal use but not for sale or distribution, the Undetectable Firearms Act applies, and NFA making requires prior ATF approval.

SDCL 22-14-5; SDCL 23-7-43; SDCL 22-14-6; SDCL 22-1-2(8), (17); SDCL 23-7-8.6; SDCL 7-18A-36, 8-5-13, 9-19-20

Federal law, gunsmithing schools, and tools →

What we could not confirm

• Whether an Enhanced or Gold Card applicant pays any out-of-pocket amount for the FBI/DCI fingerprint criminal background check. SDCL 23-7-53 directs the sheriff to forward "the payment for the criminal background check" to the Division of Criminal Investigation but does not say who supplies it or how much; no amount appears anywhere in SDCL ch. 23-7, whose complete section index (23-7-1 to 23-7-72) was re-read on 2026-09-15, and neither the SOS Permit Types page, the SOS Fee Schedule, nor the July 2026 Firearm Handbook lists any applicant fee. SDCL 23-7-72's county reimbursement schedule ($50 initial enhanced, $30 initial gold card) strongly implies the state absorbs it, and SDCL 23-7-53(3) bars a charge when the sheriff takes the prints - but no official statement says explicitly that the applicant pays $0. An individual sheriff might charge for fingerprinting done outside the sheriff's office, or send you to a third-party vendor. Verify with your county sheriff before assuming a $0 total.
• The cost of the private qualifying handgun course required for the Enhanced permit is set by the individual NRA-certified instructor and is not fixed by statute or published by the state, so the Enhanced permit has a real out-of-pocket cost that this record reports as $0 only because the $0 is the STATE's charge.
• The Secretary of State publishes the Enhanced Permit Use of Force Instructor roster at a DATE-STAMPED URL that rotates every time a new edition is posted, so any link to it rots without warning. As of 2026-09-15 the live file is https://sdsos.gov/general-services/assets/2026JUNERosterEnhanced.pdf (HTTP 200). Probing the whole 2026 series showed only JAN, MAY and JUNE exist; FEB, MAR, APR, JUL/JULY, AUG and SEP/SEPT all return 404, so JUNE is the current edition. Worse, the two SOS pages that link the roster disagree with each other: cc-handgun-course.aspx links the JUNE file while cc-permit-types.aspx still links ../assets/2026JANRosterEnhanced.pdf. The directory has also moved - older editions sit under /general-services/concealed-pistol-permits/docs/ (e.g. SEP2024RosterEnhanced.pdf, still HTTP 200) while 2026 editions sit under /general-services/assets/. For this reason instructorRegistryUrl points at the stable cc-handgun-course.aspx landing page rather than at any PDF. The next reviewer should expect the JUNE PDF link to break and should re-read the landing page rather than trusting the stored PDF URL.
• The Secretary of State's July 2026 Firearm Handbook is internally inconsistent and its reprinted statutory text is stale in places, so it must not be quoted as the current code. Three instances found on 2026-09-15: (a) its narrative says the renewal grace period is "sixty-day" while its own statutory appendix correctly reprints SDCL 23-7-8.13 as "thirty-day"; (b) it reprints SDCL 22-1-2(8) in the pre-2026 wording that makes a firearm silencer a controlled weapon, whereas the section as amended by SL 2026, ch 96, § 1 now reads "includes a machine gun and short shotgun, but does not include a firearm silencer"; (c) it reprints SDCL 23-7-59 in the pre-2023 wording ("at least one course ... per year", "may promulgate rules") whereas the current section requires a course "at least once every six months" and makes rulemaking mandatory. Every statutory figure in this record was taken from the legislature's own statute records, not from the Handbook.
• Whether South Dakota recognizes carry licenses issued by the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, or other U.S. territories. The SOS FAQ says "all other U.S. states" and the Firearm Handbook says "the state of its issue"; neither addresses non-state jurisdictions, and no SOS page resolves it. Only states are listed in reciprocity.honors. In practice this is moot, since non-residents may carry concealed in South Dakota without any permit.
• No published official list enumerates the inbound-recognized states one by one - recognition is stated categorically in the SOS Firearm Handbook and FAQ #4. The enumerated list here was derived from that categorical language, then reduced to the states that actually issue a permit. The state's only state-by-state table, the reciprocity grid PDF, covers the opposite direction and the SOS reciprocity page carries no "last updated" date at all as of 2026-09-15.
• SDCL 23-7-70 (enacted by SL 2019, ch 113, § 14) remains shown in the codified law as "Repealed. Source: SL 2019, ch 113, § 14; SL 2025, ch 36, § 5." The repealed text is still not retrievable from the statute database, so what that section had covered could not be confirmed. It does not affect the permitless-carry conclusion, which rests on SDCL 23-7-7 and the repeal of SDCL 22-14-9.
• Whether, and for which permit types, a South Dakota permit can be presented to a dealer in place of a NICS check was not confirmed today: the ATF Brady Permit Chart at atf.gov returned HTTP 403 to every fetch attempt, including with a browser user agent, so the primary federal source could not be read. A web-search summary of that chart indicated a South Dakota REGULAR permit issued on or after July 1, 2018 qualifies, which if correct means the baseline was wrong to attribute this benefit specifically to the Enhanced permit; because the chart itself was unreadable, this record now makes no permit-type-specific Brady claim. A reader planning a purchase should confirm with the dealer or the ATF chart directly.
• On home manufacture, no South Dakota statute affirmatively authorizes or expressly addresses building a firearm for personal use, or privately made / unserialized / 3D-printed firearms. The "allowed, no serial required" conclusion is inferred from the absence of any prohibition, plus the narrow wording of SDCL 22-14-5, whose current text was re-read on 2026-09-15 and reaches only a firearm "on which the manufacturer's serial number has been changed, altered, removed, or obliterated" (unamended since SL 2005, ch 120, § 243). It has not been confirmed by an official state interpretation or Attorney General opinion, and a court could read SDCL 22-14-5 more broadly. Independent federal law (NFA, Undetectable Firearms Act, prohibition on making for sale without a license) applies regardless.
• The SOS FAQ #17 says applications go through the county sheriff's office, "which conducts background checks and makes approval decisions," which sits in tension with the mandatory language of SDCL 23-7-7 ("A permit to carry a concealed pistol must be issued to any applicant by the sheriff") and 23-7-7.1 ("A temporary permit ... shall be issued ... within five days of application"). Classified as shall-issue based on the statutory text, with denials appealable to circuit court under SDCL 23-7-7.1 and chapter 1-26.
• The South Dakota Legislature's statute site is a JavaScript application that does not render for a plain fetch. All statutory text in this record was read instead from that site's own JSON records at https://sdlegislature.gov/api/Statutes/Statute/<section>, which return the section's catchline, text and "Source" amendment-history line. The human-facing URLs stored in statuteCitations were not individually rendered; they are the canonical citation form for the same sections.
• SOS pages carry small internal inconsistencies that are not resolved here and do not affect any field: cc-permit-types describes the enhanced-permit law-enforcement substitution as open to a current or former SOUTH DAKOTA officer while SDCL 23-7-53(4)(b) says "law enforcement officer" without the state limitation; and cc-application states the false-information penalty as a $2,000 fine while the Handbook states $4,000 (SDCL 23-7-12 itself specifies only "Class 6 felony").