Arizona – Travel Alert

From the 50 State Visitor Guide:

A.R.S. 2019  §§ 13-3821 through 13-3829, 13-3727

Registration Triggers and Deadlines:

Visitors must register if staying for more than 72 hours excluding weekends & holidays (per statute). §13-3821(A). SOR office refuses to answer whether return visits allowed per month or year. “That’s determined by local sheriff.” NOTE: AZ SOR office defers on many questions to local county sheriffs for interpretation. Updated Aug 2024.

Initial registration required “within 72 hours excluding weekends & holidays of entering and remaining in any county.”  §13-3821.  Updated 8/2022.  Registrants working in state must report in any county where present for 14 consecutive days or an aggregate of 30 days/yr.  Address change etc. required within 72 hours (business days only).  §13-3822.

Residency/Presence and Other Restrictions:

Residence restriction:  1,000 ft. restriction applies to Level 3 offenders. §13-3727. Local governments are pre-empted from adopting more restrictive requirements. §13-3727.

Duration & updates:

10 years to life. Transients report every 90 days.  All others annually.

Travel Alert: Registration deadline reduced to 72 hours!

As part of my 2022 update of my 50 state registered visitors guide I have discovered that the state of Arizona has reduced the time period in-state which will trigger a registered visitor’s obligation to register from 10 days (which wasn’t so bad) to just 72 hours (excluding weekends and legal holidays).  

That’s pretty short!  It also puts Arizona in the same category as Tennessee by specifying a number of hours instead of days while excluding weekends and holidays from the calculation.  For a state with so much for any visitor to see, it’s a real shame.

There are a couple of silver linings to this change.  First, by expressing their new deadline in hours instead of days, Arizona has eliminated the whole question of whether a partial day counts toward the calculation.  Instead, if you cross the state line at, say, 2:00 pm on a Thursday, your time clock will start and you will have used up 34 of your 72 hour allotment by midnight on Friday night.  Your clock starts again on Monday at 12:00 AM and you’ll have until 2:00 pm on Tuesday to get out of state.

Second, there is nothing to prevent registered visitors form leaving for a couple of hours – having lunch at a restaurant just across the state line (making sure to keep your receipt so you can prove you left Arizona) – then returning and starting the clock all over again.  In theory, if you left on Tuesday and returned Wednesday morning, your next 72 hours would take you into the following weekend and you could stay until the wee hours of the following Monday morning. That’ll give you back most of the 10 days you had before this change in Arizona law.

On the other hand, you will have to plan your Arizona vacation more carefully.  Good luck to you all.