Satellite altimetry has successfully monitored inland waters for more than 30 years and is increasingly important as the demand for freshwater grows and climate change accelerates. Launched in December 2022, the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite is the first to provide 2D spatially distributed elevation measurements, with a nominal 21-day revisit time and better coverage depending on latitude. Here, we evaluate the SWOT L2 HR PIXC 2.0 data product for constructing water surface elevation (WSE) time series at 40 Danish lakes with a surface area above 0.25km2 via the summary measures RMSE and Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC). Two methods to derive the bias between the SWOT-based WSE and the gauge water level were tested; a constant bias and a newly proposed acquisition-specific bias. Based on the 40 gauged lakes we find a median RMSE of 5.76cm and 8.87cm and PCC of 0.93 and 0.76, for the acquisition-specific bias and constant bias, respectively.   Additionally, we examined the spatial variations of the water surface elevations in the L2 HR PIXC 2.0 data product. Compared with ICESat-2, we found that the spatially distributed variations in SWOT data were unlikely to represent real physical phenomena. Our findings highlight the potential of SWOT for generating high-accuracy WSE time series, for small lakes. SWOT’s broad spatial coverage offers far greater temporal frequency (for Danish lakes: usually 3 to 4 acquisitions per 21-day orbit) compared to traditional satellite altimeters, enabling new insights into water level dynamics that were previously unattainable.