We explicitly describe the decomposition into irreducibles of the restriction of the principal series representations of $SL(2,k)$, for $k$ a $p$-adic field, to each of its two maximal compact subgroups (up to conjugacy). We identify these irreducible subrepresentations in the Kirillov-type classification of Shalika. We go on to explicitly describe the decomposition of the reducible principal series of $SL(2,k)$ in terms of the restrictions of its irreducible constituents to a maximal compact subgroup.