Rapides Parish, LA Soliciting & Door-to-Door: No-Knock Registry (2026)

Sec. 19-15, adopted by the same December 8, 1970 ordinance that created the parish's peddling rules, declares it a nuisance and a misdemeanor for solicitors, peddlers, hawkers, itinerant merchants or transient vendors of merchandise to go in and upon private residences in Rapides Parish without having been requested or invited to do so by the owner or occupant, for the purpose of soliciting orders for goods, wares and merchandise or disposing of or peddling or hawking the same. The rule functions as the parish's no-knock/no-solicitation standard: absent an invitation, a resident does not have to post a sign to be off-limits, because the ordinance places the burden on the seller to have been asked first.

Sec. 19-16 narrows the ban with two exceptions, one from 1970 and one added by a 1983 amendment: it does not reach the sale of milk, dairy products, vegetables, poultry, eggs and other farm and garden produce where the law otherwise authorizes that sale, and it does not reach salesmen soliciting cable television hookups for a franchised cable company. No exception is written for general commercial peddlers, insurance or home-improvement solicitors, or charities knocking door to door under this section; those groups get a carve-out only under the separate street-canvassing rule in Sec.

19-14. A violation of Sec. 19-15 is punished under Sec. 19-17, which sets a misdemeanor penalty of up to thirty days in the parish jail or a fine of up to one hundred dollars, or both, at the court's discretion.