Why We Chose South Dakota

One of the stranger questions that comes with deciding to travel full-time is one we had never really thought about before: Where do you live when you don’t live anywhere?

You can sell your house, put your belongings in storage, and take off down the road, but the rest of the world still expects you to have an address. You need a state for your driver’s license. Your vehicles have to be registered somewhere. Banks want an address. Insurance companies want one. The government certainly wants one.

In other words, becoming nomadic doesn’t mean becoming stateless.

For full-time travelers, the answer is usually something called domicile. Your domicile is essentially your legal home base—the state you intend to treat as home even though you may spend much of the year somewhere else.

When we began researching this, three states kept appearing over and over again: South Dakota, Texas, and Florida. They aren't the only states a full-time traveler can call home, but they are three of the most established choices in the full-time RV and nomadic communities.

After looking at all three, we chose South Dakota.

And there were some very practical reasons why.

The biggest surprise for us was discovering that South Dakota doesn't merely tolerate full-time travelers. The state actually has a process specifically for them.

The South Dakota Department of Public Safety says that a person may qualify for a South Dakota driver's license if they have a physical residential address in the state, live full-time in an RV or camper, or travel full-time for work.

That last category was particularly important for us. We aren't retiring into an RV. We still work. Our primary business can operate remotely, which means our family can travel while we continue working from wherever we happen to be. South Dakota's rules expressly contemplate people who live this kind of mobile life. 

For qualifying full-time travelers using a South Dakota personal mailbox, the state's driver's-license requirements include:

• a completed Residency Affidavit;

• a receipt in your name showing one night's stay in a South Dakota hotel, motel, campground, or RV park within the previous year; and

• documentation showing your South Dakota personal mailbox (PMB) address. A virtual-only address doesn't qualify. 

Yes. One night.

That was the part that initially sounded like internet folklore to me. It isn't. It's right there in South Dakota's official requirements.

For a first South Dakota driver's license or ID, you still have to appear in person and provide the ordinary identification documents required for licensing. Depending upon your circumstances, those can include proof of identity, Social Security number, and documentation of any name changes. If you're transferring an existing driver's license, you also surrender the license from your former state. 

So this isn't some loophole where you rent a hotel room and magically become a South Dakotan. It's an established procedure designed for people who genuinely live without a conventional permanent residence.

There's an important qualification here, too: South Dakota says someone who owns, lives in, or maintains a full-time residence in another state does not qualify under its full-time-traveler rules. 

For us, that fit. We weren't keeping a Kansas house to come home to. We really were leaving.

The other piece of the puzzle is a personal mailbox, or PMB.

A PMB isn’t simply a P.O. box. Full-time-traveler mail services provide an actual mailing address where your mail can be received while you’re traveling. Depending on the service you choose, they can scan your mail, hold it for you, or forward it to wherever you happen to be.

South Dakota specifically recognizes qualifying PMB addresses as part of its full-time-traveler licensing process. The state requires evidence connecting you to that PMB, such as a receipt from the mailbox company or qualifying mail addressed to you there. It also specifically states that a virtual address or virtual postal address isn’t sufficient.

That distinction matters. You can’t just buy any inexpensive “virtual address” on the internet and assume South Dakota will accept it for residency and licensing purposes.

We looked at several mail-forwarding services geared toward full-time travelers before ultimately settling on DakotaPost in Sioux Falls. They’ve been doing this for years, understand South Dakota’s residency requirements, and offer the mail-scanning and forwarding services we’ll need while we’re on the road.

So, yes, somewhat bizarrely, one of the first steps toward becoming South Dakota residents was renting ourselves a mailbox.

This was another significant reason South Dakota made sense for us.

South Dakota has no individual state income tax.

That's not a travel-blog rumor, either. The South Dakota Department of Revenue states plainly that South Dakota is one of the states that does not impose an individual state income tax. 

For a family whose income continues to come from work while we're traveling, that was obviously something we had to consider.

It is important to understand what that does not mean. Establishing domicile in South Dakota doesn't magically make every tax obligation everywhere disappear. Depending upon where and how you earn income, another jurisdiction can potentially impose taxes based upon its own laws. Business taxation is another matter entirely.

But as our personal state of domicile, South Dakota's lack of an individual income tax was a major advantage.

This was the next obvious question because Florida and Texas are also extremely popular with full-time travelers.

All three have one very attractive thing in common: none imposes an individual state income tax. Texas's Comptroller confirms that Texans do not pay state or local individual income taxes, while South Dakota's Department of Revenue confirms the same basic advantage there. 

But domicile involves considerably more than taxes.

Florida has a long history as a domicile state for people who don't spend the entire year there. It even has a statutory procedure for filing a Declaration of Domicile.

Florida law allows someone who has established domicile there to file a sworn statement with the clerk of the circuit court declaring Florida to be his or her permanent home. Florida even addresses people who maintain another place of abode elsewhere, allowing them to declare the Florida home their predominant and principal home. 

For someone who winters in Florida, regularly returns there, or otherwise has strong Florida ties, that can make a great deal of sense.

But that wasn't us.

We weren't looking for a state in which we intended to spend a particular season every year. We needed a legal home base designed around the reality that we may be almost anywhere.

Texas is also enormously popular among full-time RV travelers and has a well-developed ecosystem of mail-forwarding and domicile services. Like South Dakota, it has no individual state income tax. 

Texas has also become somewhat easier for travelers with vehicles. Beginning in 2025, Texas eliminated the annual safety inspection requirement for most noncommercial vehicles, although vehicles registered in certain counties remain subject to emissions requirements. 

Texas therefore wasn't a bad option at all.

It simply didn't offer us a compelling advantage over South Dakota's unusually straightforward full-time-traveler procedure.

Ultimately, this wasn't really about finding a tax trick.

It was about finding a state whose laws actually matched our life.

We had sold or given away most of what we owned. We had left our house. We weren't maintaining another permanent residence. Our work could travel with us. We needed a reliable mailing address, driver's licenses, vehicle registrations, and one state that could legitimately be called home, even while our physical home changed from month to month.

South Dakota essentially said: We have a process for people like you.

The one-night requirement made establishing the necessary physical connection with the state practical. The PMB system gave us a permanent mailing base. The absence of an individual state income tax was financially attractive. And, perhaps most importantly, South Dakota's Department of Public Safety explicitly recognizes people who travel full-time rather than forcing us to pretend we lived conventionally when we didn't. 

That made our decision surprisingly easy.

No.

Florida may make more sense for someone who regularly spends winters there. Texas may make sense for someone with family, business, medical, or other substantial ties to Texas. And there are other possible domicile states beyond these three. 

Domicile is also more than the address printed on your driver's license. If you still maintain a house, employment, business interests, or significant connections to another state, your situation can be considerably more complicated.

But if you're genuinely giving up your fixed residence and becoming a full-time traveler, South Dakota is worth investigating precisely because the state has created a formal path for that lifestyle.

For us, that was the deciding factor.

We weren't trying to figure out how to convince a state that our unconventional life counted as residency.

We chose a state that already understood it.

A note from us: This article describes our family's research and experience and is intended as general information, not legal or tax advice. Residency, domicile, taxation, insurance, voting, and vehicle-registration rules can change and can depend on your individual circumstances. Before changing domicile, check the current requirements with the relevant state agencies and consult a qualified professional when appropriate.