South Dakota Age Verification Law: SDCL 22-24-69 Explained

South Dakota requires covered platforms to verify a visitor's age before allowing access to material harmful to minors. Unlike most states in this comparison, South Dakota backs that requirement with two separate enforcement tracks at once: escalating criminal penalties against the platform itself, and a separate civil penalty only the Attorney General can pursue after a mandatory notice-and-cure period.

What South Dakota's Age-Verification Law Requires

House Bill 1053, enacted in 2025, added new sections to SDCL chapter 22-24: sections 22-24-69 through 22-24-73, confirmed directly against the South Dakota Legislative Research Council's own statute database. Section 22-24-69 requires a covered platform to implement reasonable age verification to confirm the age of any individual who attempts to access material that is harmful to minors, and to prevent a minor's access to that material. Section 22-24-70 separately bars a covered platform, or a third party that performs the section 22-24-69 age verification on a covered platform's behalf, from selling or retaining any identifying information collected for that verification. An independent age-verification vendor is therefore directly exposed under section 22-24-70, not merely through the platform that hired it, and faces the same Class 1 misdemeanor and Class 6 felony penalties.

SDCL section 22-24-29 is a different, older statute that already existed before HB 1053 and addresses a general offense, disseminating material harmful to minors to a minor directly. HB 1053 amended that section for an unrelated purpose; it did not use section 22-24-29 to create the age-verification requirement. Do not cite section 22-24-29 as South Dakota's age-verification law.

A covered platform is one that operates «in the regular course of trade or business,» not a site that crosses a percentage-of-content threshold; South Dakota does not use the roughly one-third test that several other states in this comparison apply. Approved verification methods, defined at SDCL section 22-24-27(14), include a state-issued identification card, a bank account, a credit or debit card, or another reasonably reliable method.

Section 22-24-73 places three categories outside the law entirely. Sections 22-24-69 through 22-24-72 do not apply to any general-purpose search engine, to an internet service provider or its affiliates or subsidiaries, or to a cloud service provider. A search engine that surfaces a link to covered material, and the infrastructure providers that carry or host traffic, therefore owe no verification duty under this chapter; the obligation sits on the platform serving the material.

The law took effect July 1, 2025, roughly four months after Governor Larry Rhoden signed it on February 27, 2025.

The Penalty Is Both Criminal and Civil

South Dakota's law is sometimes described as purely criminal, but that understates it. Two separate enforcement tracks apply.

Criminal: under sections 22-24-69 and 22-24-70, a first violation of either the age-verification mandate or the retention ban is a Class 1 misdemeanor, and a subsequent violation is a Class 6 felony. The two sections do not word the escalation identically. Section 22-24-69 makes a subsequent violation a felony only where it is committed by the same covered platform. Section 22-24-70 states simply that a subsequent violation of that section is a Class 6 felony, with no same-platform qualifier, and it reaches a third-party verification vendor as well as the platform.

Civil, Attorney-General-only: section 22-24-72 separately authorizes an injunction and a civil penalty of not more than $5,000 for each separate instance a covered platform fails to perform reasonable age verification, payable to the state's general fund. That civil penalty may be assessed and recovered only in a civil action brought by the Attorney General; South Dakota's law does not create a private right of action for the civil-penalty track. Before pursuing either penalty, section 22-24-71 requires the Attorney General to give the platform written notice of the violation and a 90-day opportunity to cure it; a cured violation is not subject to either criminal or civil liability.

The $5,000-per-instance civil-penalty figure happens to match the dollar figure used in Wyoming's private damages provision. The two are not the same mechanism: South Dakota's is an Attorney-General-only civil penalty gated by a notice-and-cure period, while Wyoming's is a private right of action available to a parent or guardian without a cure period.

How South Dakota's Law Fits the National Pattern

South Dakota's law is part of a wave of state statutes enacted since the mid-2020s requiring age verification before access to adult content. The U.S. Supreme Court's June 2025 decision in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton upheld a nearly identical Texas law, holding that this category of statute triggers, and survives, intermediate scrutiny.

What sets South Dakota apart is not one differentiator but two: a «regular course of trade or business» coverage test rather than a percentage-of-content threshold, and a dual enforcement structure that layers escalating criminal penalties on top of an Attorney-General-only civil track gated by a mandatory notice-and-cure period. That combination is more layered than the private-right-of-action or Attorney-General-civil-penalty-only models most other states in this category use.

Litigation Status

No lawsuit challenging HB 1053 or SDCL sections 22-24-69 through -73 was found in this research. The ACLU of South Dakota publicly opposed the bill during the 2025 legislative session, raising concerns typical of this category of law, but that opposition did not translate into a court filing as of this writing. This is a researched-but-unconfirmed negative finding rather than a docket search confirming no case exists, and it should be rechecked before being treated as permanent, since the law is recent enough that a challenge could still emerge.

Why the Signing Date and Effective Date Differ

Governor Rhoden signed HB 1053 on February 27, 2025, but the law did not take legal effect until July 1, 2025. A gap of several months between a bill's signing and its statutory effective date is common for legislation passed during South Dakota's regular session and does not, by itself, indicate any conflict or error between the two dates.

Verified directly against the South Dakota Legislative Research Council's own statute database (sdlegislature.gov) for SDCL sections 22-24-69 through 22-24-73's official titles and text, current as of 2026-09-02. An earlier draft of this page cited SDCL section 22-24-29 and described the penalty as criminal-only; both were corrected after a direct read of the official statute database and the enrolled bill text showed section 22-24-29 is a separate, pre-existing statute and that HB 1053 also created a distinct Attorney-General-only civil-penalty track.

Related Resources

• Age Verification Laws by State
• Wyoming Age Verification Law
• Tennessee Age Verification Law
• Texas Age Verification Law

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Last updated: 2026-08-14.