Subsea structures employed on offshore oil and gas production systems are commonly designed to be laid on seafloor for decades. For most of these structures the installation is a critical stage and may require costly resources and significant engineering effort. Lowering subsea structures through the wave zone is a complex operation as it involves accelerations of these bodies induced by the vessel motion which, associated to the sea surface displacements, may lead to significant impact loads on these structures during water entry. The initial stage of impact during water entry has been a subject of many researches over the past century since the pioneering work of von Kármán and Wagner on the hydrodynamics of an alighting sea plane. The scenario of impact of the forebody of a ship on the sea surface has also been subject of studies, as it may cause localized and eventually catastrophic damage to the hull. Different numerical methods have been applied to the analysis of this problem. The main contribution of this work is the use of the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method to estimate slamming loads on rigid bodies during water entry considering both calm and wavy surfaces. A basic theoretical background on hydrodynamic impact load is firstly introduced, followed by the description of the SPH method. Applications of SPH to simulate water entry of rigid bodies considering both free fall and constant velocity cases are presented and results are compared with experiments and numerical simulations from the literature. The presence of regular waves during constant velocity water entry is also considered. The numerical results obtained here demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to estimate slamming loads on subsea structures during water entry.