Abstract The single-particle properties of Mg29 have been investigated via a measurement of the Mg28(d,p)Mg29 reaction, in inverse kinematics, using the ISOLDE Solenoidal Spectrometer. The negative-parity intruder states from the fp shell have been identified and used to benchmark modern shell-model calculations. The systematic data on the single-particle centroids along the N=17 isotones show good agreement with shell-model predictions in describing the observed trends from stability toward O25.