State record SD
South Dakota gold and silver money law
Every claim on this page was checked against its sources on .
Sales tax on bullion
Exempt
South Dakota Codified Law 10-45-110 exempts the gross receipts from the sale of coins, currency, or bullion from sales and use tax. The statute defines bullion as any bar, ingot, or commemorative medallion of gold, silver, platinum, palladium, or a combination of these metals, where the value of the metal depends on its content and not the form, and defines coins and currency as any coins or currency made of gold, silver, or other metal or paper that is or has been used as legal tender. Because the coins and currency clause reaches a monetized coin made of any metal, not only gold and silver, a platinum or palladium coin used as currency falls within that clause even though the separate bullion clause's coverage of platinum and palladium is limited to bar, ingot, and medallion form. The statute's official text, as published by the South Dakota Legislative Research Council, contains no purity percentage and no dollar minimum or maximum. Its source note attributes the section to Session Laws 2007, Chapter 60, Section 1.
Sources
Legal tender status
Gold and silver are not recognized as legal tender in South Dakota as of the verification date above.
State income tax on gains
South Dakota has no state individual income tax, a fact the state's own Department of Revenue states plainly, so there is no state-level tax on capital gains from bullion sales or from any other source to exempt. This is a general feature of South Dakota's tax system rather than a provision aimed at precious metals.
Sources
Legislative history
The South Dakota history below is not cited sentence by sentence; it rests on the numbered sources listed elsewhere on this page, [1] to [3].
South Dakota has no legal tender statute for gold or silver. Senate Bill 112 of the 2026 session, carried by Senator John Carley with a large slate of cosponsors, would have declared gold and silver specie legal tender and set up a state bullion depository and transactional currency system. The Senate State Affairs Committee voted 7 to 1 on February 9, 2026, to defer the bill to the 41st legislative day, which ended its chances for the session without a floor vote in either chamber. As of this page's verification date, South Dakota has enacted no legal tender declaration and has no state bullion depository.
What South Dakota has had since 2007 is a broad sales tax exemption. SDCL 10-45-110 exempts the sale of coins, currency, and bullion from sales and use tax, defining bullion as bars, ingots, or medallions of gold, silver, platinum, or palladium valued by metal content, and defining coins and currency as any coin or currency of gold, silver, or other metal that is or has been used as legal tender. Because the currency clause is not limited to gold and silver, a monetized coin in any of the four metals is covered, and no purity percentage or dollar threshold appears anywhere in the statute's text.
South Dakota's capital gains treatment follows from a broader fact about the state rather than from any metals-specific statute: South Dakota has no state individual income tax at all, so gains from selling bullion, like gains from selling anything else, are not taxed at the state level.
Bills and acts
SB112 Failed
2026 Regular Session
Establish a currency based on gold and silver
Sponsored by Senator John Carley and a large group of House and Senate cosponsors, this bill would have recognized gold and silver specie as legal tender in South Dakota and authorized a state bullion depository and related transactional currency. The official Legislative Research Council bill history shows the Senate State Affairs Committee voted 7 to 1 on February 9, 2026, to defer the bill to the 41st legislative day, a procedural step that in South Dakota's legislative calendar ends a bill's consideration for the session. It never received a vote of the full Senate and never became law.
Where sources disagree
Each South Dakota divergence note below is drawn from the same numbered sources as the findings above, [1] to [3], and is not separately numbered against any one of them.
These are recorded rather than resolved. Each describes a real discrepancy between sources this page relies on.
- Divergence 1
This record found no widely repeated secondary claim that conflicts with the primary sources on South Dakota's sales tax exemption or its lack of a legal tender statute. One secondary blog post referenced an unspecified later legislative attempt to repeal the 2007 bullion exemption that was defeated in committee, but this record could not locate an official South Dakota Legislature bill number, session, or vote record for that claim, so it is not asserted here as fact.