Nevada
From the 50 State Visitor Guide
Nev. Rev. Stat. Ann. 2019 §§179B and 179D (Effective Oct. 1, 2018)
AWA Compliant
Registration
Triggers and Deadlines:
48 hours for initial registration and updates; updates may
be in person. §§179D.460, 479D.480.
However,
Nevada SOR office states that visitors for less than 30 days are not placed on
the SOR registry but on a separate “visitors registry” that is not public.
Visitors must “check in” within 48 hours & provide info to law enforcement.
Return to “check out” when departing the state. The “visitors registry”
including the dates of your visit(s) is available to law enforcement agencies
only.
This SOR office info updated & confirmed Apr. 2021.
Confirmed by Las Vegas Metro Police Dept. Oct. 2021.
Also: North Las Vegas Police “OffenderWatch” Safety Tips
https://sheriffalerts.com/cap_safety_1.php?office=54127
“Do I have to register as a sex offender in North Las Vegas
if I am only visiting? Sex
offenders who will be visiting North Las Vegas and will be staying in North Las
Vegas for more than 48 hours, must register as “Sex Offender – Visitor”.” (emphasis added)
Residency/Presence and Other Restrictions:
No statewide
restrictions.
Duration & updates:
15 years to life. §179D.480.
Procedure available for removal from registry after departure.
Nevada (supposedly) has a separate “visitors registry”
Nevada (supposedly) is one of a handful of states that, by policy, treats a statutory very short (in Nevada’s case 48 hours) visitor registration requirement as a “duty to check in” but holds SO visitor information separately pending a commitment to depart within a specified time (up to 30 days); your info becomes part of a “visitors registry” that is not made public. Other states that do this are Alaska, South Dakota and Rhode Island.
I first became aware of this separate “visitors registry” while calling every state SOR office as part of my research in 2020. The nice lady at the Nevada SOR office told me all about it. Then, following well known advice to not necessarily accept at face value anything some random person at a SOR office says, I called back in April 2021 to re-ask the question, and the same nice lady took my call. She even remembered me from my previous call. She gave me the same answer, with a few additional clarifying details.
And yet, there seems to be nothing on the Nevada SOR website about this.
In October 2021 I was passing through Nevada anyway on my way from California to Utah. So, restricting myself to two partial days in-state and foregoing all the potential sins and delights of Las Vegas, my one and only stop was the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (see photo). My sole purpose was to find out if they knew anything about this separate unpublished “visitors registry.”
If there’s one thing I always say about police registry offices it’s this: “The person sitting at the desk behind the bulletproof glass is without a doubt the least knowledgeable person in the whole building.” That was certainly the case here. She had never heard of any “visitors registry.” However, with a little prodding I was able to get her to go ask her supervisor about it, and when she returned a few minutes later she smiled cheerfully and said, “Yes, there is a visitors registry, and as long as you check in within 48 hours of your arrival, and give us all the information about your visit, and come back to check out before you leave, you will go on that visitors registry.”
So as far as I can tell, Nevada’s unpublished “visitors registry” is a real thing. But even now, years later, I haven’t built up the nerve to walk into a Nevada police station and actually APPLY TO GET ON any registry – reassurances or not! I’m not ruling out putting this state to the ultimate test in the future, but for now I’m too much of a chicken.
You may be wondering why any state SOR office, whether in Nevada, Alaska, Rhode Island or elsewhere, would go out of their way to create a separate visitors registry when it’s not spelled out in state law. As a person who worked as a government bureaucrat his entire career (until I ruined my life), I’m confident I know the answer: work avoidance.
You see, these states with separate visitors registries have very short visitor registration requirements, but they also have standardized procedures available to remove you from their registries after you leave (unlike Tennessee, Florida and 13 other states that keep you on their registries forever in order to pad their numbers and get more federal funding).
What this means for a SOR office (or sheriff’s department) bureaucrat is that any time a visitor is forced to register, they have to do all the work of adding that person to their registry and posting it on their website. Then as soon as that person leaves the state they have to do all the work of removing that person from their registry and their website. That’s double the work for somebody they really couldn’t care less about. Thus is born the separate, low effort “visitors registry.”
Once I got home from my 2021 trip I tried one last internet search to see if I could find something, anything about Nevada’s “visitor’s registry.” Nothing on the state SOR site, but my Google search did turn up one document:
North Las Vegas Police “OffenderWatch” Safety Tips
https://sheriffalerts.com/cap_safety_1.php?office=54127
“Do I have to register as a sex offender in North Las Vegas if I am only visiting? Sex offenders who will be visiting North Las Vegas and will be staying in North Las Vegas for more than 48 hours, must register as “Sex Offender – Visitor”.” (emphasis added)
The way this is worded, it sure makes it sound like a separate visitors registry, which further confirms that such a thing exists.
But if this thing really exists, and the Nevada SOR office is happy to tell you all about it, how come NOBODY else seems to know about it? Not the lady behind the bulletproof glass at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Not hardly anybody visiting Las Vegas – because if people were walking into the registry office asking to sign up for it even occasionally, the lady behind the bulletproof glass would be aware of it, right? Not anybody who has ever spoken up at any ACSOL monthly phone call – and again, they talk about Nevada all the time because most of their members are next door in California.
That’s what continues to give me the creeps about the whole thing.
Most recent visit: August 2025
In early August 2025 I was on my way from Oregon to Utah and that necessarily took me through Nevada. Before entering at the state’s incredibly remote northwest corner on SR 140 I made sure to gas up and pick up supplies in Lakeview, OR. My mission was to get to the Utah state line and the Bonneville Salt Flats within the 48 hours allowed by the Nevada registry. That’s not difficult since there’s nothing worth seeing in this part of Nevada anyway. Passing through the Sheldon National Antelope Refuge and seeing no antelope kind of set the tone. Instead I occupied myself by making a few
Small Town Notes:
Winnemucca – Not much to see here.
The whole town seems to be migrating towards I-80.
Battle Mountain – I read or saw somewhere that this town was “Voted Armpit
of America.” It’s not quite that bad –
allow me to suggest Wendover, UT (see below) if you want to make a
comparison. But it is a jumble of
rotting mobile homes.
West Wendover, NV & Wendover, UT – There is a military base just outside of Wendover, UT so
that makes this just about the dumpiest base employee town I’ve ever witnessed,
with mobile homes rotting into the ground.
West Wendover, NV is a failed military retiree mobile home community,
where veterans could retire out in the desert and be close to base
services. Except it’s deteriorating and
kind of not completed. Also the only
person I saw while driving around was a young latino boy walking his bicycle,
which doesn’t fit well with the idea this is still a retirement community.
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