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24/7 Sobriety Program costs: the DUI programme whose fee floor is written into the statute
South Dakota's 24/7 Sobriety Program is the original twice-a-day breath-testing regime for DUI offenders, created by SDCL sections 1-11-17 to 1-11-25 and copied by several other states. It is also a useful honesty test for a cost site: the programme is offender-paid, the enabling statute itself fixes a floor for the core testing fee, and almost everything above that floor is set administratively rather than published in a statewide schedule. This page prices what the law publishes, names what it does not, and does not borrow figures from the private monitoring market.
Who is put on the programme, and why it is a permit price
The programme's DUI hook is SDCL section 32-23-23. A driving permit issued by the court to a person convicted of a DUI violation within the last ten years — and any permit issued after an offence at 0.17 percent or more by weight of alcohol in the blood — is conditioned on the person's total abstinence from alcohol, participation in the 24/7 Sobriety Program where testing is available, and payment of the associated costs and expenses. Read that structure carefully: for a repeat offender or a high-reading first offender in South Dakota, the programme fee is not an optional add-on to the sentence. It is the price of the permit that lets the person drive at all during the suspension, charged on top of the fine structure in our South Dakota breakdown. Courts may also order participation as a condition of a suspended imposition of sentence, a suspended sentence, bond, or probation, which is how first offenders below the 0.17 line can land on twice-a-day testing as well.
The one fee figure the statute itself fixes
The enabling act, now codified at SDCL sections 1-11-17 to 1-11-25, authorises the Attorney General to promulgate rules for the programme, including setting participation and user fees — with one hard limit written into the law: user fees for twice-a-day testing shall not be less than one dollar per test. That single sentence is the only testing price the statewide law itself publishes, and it is a floor, not a schedule. Its arithmetic is still worth doing openly, because it is arithmetic on a statutory figure and not an estimate: twice-a-day testing means two tests a day, so the statutory floor alone prices the testing obligation at no less than two dollars per day of participation — no less than roughly fourteen dollars a week — before any amount a testing site charges above the floor, and before the separate fee categories the statute creates for the programme's other testing modes. A participant ordered onto the programme for the length of a permit period should therefore treat two dollars a day as the legal minimum of the testing line, not as a quote for what their county site will actually collect.
| 24/7 component | Published amount |
|---|---|
| Twice-a-day breath testing user fee (SDCL §§ 1-11-17 to 1-11-25, Attorney General fee authority) | Not less than $1 per test, fixed as a floor in the statute; the amount charged above the floor is set administratively and is not published in a statewide schedule |
| Twice-a-day testing at the statutory floor (arithmetic on the figure above) | 2 tests per day = not less than $2 per day of participation at the floor |
| Electronic alcohol monitoring device testing (SDCL § 1-11-25 fee distribution) | Installation and deactivation fees and a daily user fee are collected under the statute and distributed as § 1-11-25 directs; no statewide dollar schedule is published — described, not priced |
| Drug patch testing and urinalysis testing (§ 1-11-25) | A daily user fee category exists in the statute; amounts are set administratively — described, not priced |
| Participation fee for programme administration (§ 1-11-25) | Collected for the state 24/7 sobriety fund; amount set administratively — described, not priced |
| Permit condition itself (SDCL § 32-23-23) | Participation and payment of associated costs are conditions of the driving permit for repeat offenders within 10 years and offenders at 0.17 or more |
Where the money goes: the fee plumbing in section 1-11-25
Section 1-11-25 is worth reading before paying anything, because it shows the programme is built as a set of distinct fee streams rather than one bill. Daily user fees for twice-a-day testing, drug patch testing and urinalysis are collected by the sheriff or the sheriff's designated testing entity and deposited with the county treasurer, to be used only to defray the recurring costs of the programme, including equipment and support services. Installation and deactivation fees for electronic alcohol monitoring devices follow the same county route. Daily user fees for electronic monitoring, by contrast, are deposited in the state 24/7 sobriety fund created by section 1-11-18, which the Attorney General administers to defray the costs of operating the statewide programme. A participation fee covering the Attorney General's administration costs also flows to the state fund. The practical point for a participant is that a testing site's charges are a stack of these statutory categories, each with its own destination — and that a site charging well above the one-dollar floor for a breath test is exercising delegated fee-setting, which is exactly why no honest statewide price list for the programme exists beyond the floor itself.
How this differs from the monitoring page we refused to build
Readers of our earlier manifests will know this site dropped a page on privately supplied continuous alcohol monitoring bracelets because no court or agency publishes a fee schedule for them — every figure in circulation comes from device vendors or law firms. The 24/7 programme is a different animal, and the difference is the source. Its testing modes, its fee categories, its fee distribution and its one hard price — the dollar-per-test floor — are all in a published statute administered by a state Attorney General, and participation is imposed by courts under a second published statute. Where the programme's own law stops publishing numbers, this page stops too: the bracelet and drug-patch lines above are described from the statute and deliberately left unpriced, the same discipline applied on our probation costs page to supervision components with no published schedule. Programmes modelled on South Dakota's in other states, including Montana's and North Dakota's, run on their own statutes and their own administratively set fees; no figure from those programmes is imported here, and South Dakota's floor should not be read as any other state's price.
The violation side: what non-compliance triggers
The programme's economics are backstopped by its violation rules. Testing happens at a sheriff's location or a designated site, at two daily testing times roughly twelve hours apart for the twice-a-day mode, and a missed test or a positive test is treated as a programme violation that can be reported to the ordering court — exposing the participant to the sanctions for violating the underlying condition, including loss of the driving permit whose price this page exists to explain, and the sentencing consequences priced in the probation violation guide where the condition runs through probation. Travel, fuel and time costs of attending a testing site twice a day are real and, for rural participants, large; no statute prices them, so they are named here as unpriced components rather than estimated. The same goes for the wage cost of reporting to a testing window at fixed hours. A participant budgeting honestly should list those lines at whatever they actually pay locally, underneath the statutory floor — not fold them into a programme "total" this page will not fabricate.
Sources: SDCL §§ 1-11-17 to 1-11-25 (24/7 Sobriety Program; Attorney General fee authority and fee distribution in § 1-11-25; state 24/7 sobriety fund in § 1-11-18); SDCL § 32-23-23 (permit condition). Last verified: November 2026.
The fine is one line in a longer stack — court costs, program fees, interlock, supervision and reinstatement all bill separately. Price the layers that apply to your case in the calculator.
Open the DUI cost calculatorBudgeting a permit on the programme
Put together conservatively, a South Dakota repeat offender's permit period carries the fine and licence components in the state breakdown, plus a testing obligation whose published floor is two dollars a day for twice-a-day testing, plus administratively set amounts for any monitoring mode the court substitutes, plus unpriced travel and time. That is the complete honest stack the published sources support. Anyone quoting a single monthly programme price for the whole state is quoting their own county or their own vendor, and the figure will not survive contact with a different testing site — which is precisely the pattern this sprint's source rules exist to catch.
Related cost guides: South Dakota DUI penalties breakdown, South Dakota DUI cost guide, DUI probation costs, DUI probation violation costs, Ignition interlock costs.
Sources: SDCL §§ 1-11-17 to 1-11-25, 32-23-23. Last verified: November 2026. This page is educational information about costs only — not legal advice. Laws and fees change; confirm current figures with your court and your state's driver-licensing agency.