51 Jurisdictions · 204 Figures · Primary-Source Verified

State Landlord-Tenant Law Statistics: The Verified 2026 Dataset

Security deposit caps, nonpayment notice periods, lease-violation windows, month-to-month termination notice, and rent regulation for all fifty states and the District of Columbia — every figure cited to its statute, and every count on this page derived by counting the rows.

Figures verified against primary sources; last verified July 2026. 203 of the 204 figures in this dataset were read in the statutory text itself and are cited to the section they came from. 1 figure is recorded as not verified and is left blank rather than estimated. No figure on this page is taken from an aggregator, a comparison chart, or an AI-generated summary.

Most fifty-state landlord-tenant charts copy each other. That is why so many of them still show California capping security deposits at two months’ rent — a rule the legislature repealed effective July 1, 2024. This page was rebuilt the slow way instead: each figure was read in the statute, recorded with its citation and the tier of source it was read at, and marked unverified when it could not be confirmed. What follows is the result, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

The dataset covers five columns across 51 jurisdictions. Every aggregate below — how many states cap deposits at one month, which notice period is longest, how many jurisdictions have a statewide rent cap — is derived by counting the verified rows in the tables on this page, and the derivation is shown next to the number. If you want the underlying law for one state rather than the comparison, each jurisdiction name in the master table links to its own landlord-tenant guide, and our security deposit laws by state guide goes deeper on the deposit column than a comparison table can.

A word on who this is for. If you are a landlord deciding what to charge or how much notice to give, the figure you need is in the master table and the statute behind it is in the row. If you are comparing states, the derived counts under each heading do the arithmetic. And if you are checking someone else’s chart against ours, the citations are the point — go read the section. The same discipline applies to the tenancy that follows: our guide to how to screen tenants step by step covers the part of the process these statutes assume you have already done properly.

▶

Video: a short walkthrough of how landlord-tenant rules differ across the fifty states and the District of Columbia.

Key Takeaways From the 2026 Dataset

• 15 of 51 jurisdictions cap the security deposit at one month’s rent — counted from the deposit table below: AL, CA, DC, DE, HI, KS, MA, MD, ND, NE, NH, NM, NY, RI, SD. California joined this group when Assembly Bill 12 took effect July 1, 2024.
• 21 jurisdictions set no statutory deposit ceiling at all: FL, ID, IL, IN, KY, LA, MN, MS, MT, OH, OK, OR, SC, TN, TX, UT, VT, WA, WI, WV, WY. That is the single largest group in the column.
• The longest statutory nonpayment notice is 14 days, shared by 7 jurisdictions (MA, MN, NY, TN, VA, VT, WA). The shortest day-count is 3 days, in 16 jurisdictions.
• 4 jurisdictions have a statewide cap on rent increases: CA, DC, OR, WA — that is 3 states plus the District of Columbia, not the same thing as “eight states allow rent control.”
• 30 jurisdictions preempt local rent regulation outright, which is the more common rule by a wide margin.
• 4 jurisdictions bar no-cause termination of a periodic tenancy entirely (DC, NJ, OR, WA), so for them there is no landlord notice period to publish at all.

How These Figures Were Verified

Direct answer: every figure was read in the statutory text and recorded with its citation, the URL it was read at, and the tier of source it came from. Nothing was copied from another comparison chart. That is the whole point of this page, so the method is published rather than asserted.

Each of the 204 figures carries a source tier, and the tiers are counted, not estimated:

• Tier 1 — state-hosted text (182 figures). The figure was read on the legislature’s or the state’s own server: leginfo.legislature.ca.gov, nysenate.gov, malegislature.gov, flsenate.gov, and their equivalents. This is the strongest available source short of the printed session law, and it is what the great majority of this dataset rests on.
• Tier 2 — two independent public renderings (21 figures). Where a state publishes its code only through a JavaScript application that cannot be read, or its official server was unreachable, the figure was read in two independent renderings (Justia, FindLaw, Cornell’s Legal Information Institute) and confirmed to agree. Where they disagreed, the figure was not published.
• Tier 3 — secondary rendering (1 figure). One figure — the District of Columbia’s deposit cap, which lives in the municipal regulations at 14 DCMR § 308.2 rather than in the D.C. Code — was read at a secondary rendering. It is labeled as such in the table rather than presented as equal to the rest.

The rule for a figure that could not be confirmed is that it stays blank. 1 of the 204 figures in this dataset is marked not verified and is rendered as such in the table, with the reason given. A blank cell is a correct answer; a plausible guess is not. Research notes recording what could not be pinned down run to 216 entries across the fifty-one jurisdictions, and the substance of those limits is summarized near the end of this page rather than hidden.

Counts are derived, not asserted. Every aggregate on this page — “15 jurisdictions cap at one month”, “4 have a statewide cap” — is produced by counting the verified rows of the table it summarizes, and the member jurisdictions are listed next to the count so you can check the arithmetic. Where a figure is unverified, it is excluded from the count and the exclusion is stated. This matters because the previous version of this page asserted counts that its own tables contradicted.

What This Dataset Does Not Cover

Five columns is not the whole of landlord-tenant law. This dataset does not carry deposit return deadlines, deposit interest rules, entry-notice hours, late-fee caps, application-fee limits, or required lease disclosures, because those columns have not been verified to the same standard and publishing them at a lower standard would defeat the purpose. It also does not measure how the law works in practice: court backlogs, sheriff scheduling, and local ordinances routinely matter more to an actual eviction timeline than the statutory notice period does. What is here is the statutory text, verified, and nothing more is claimed for it.

Figures the Comparison Charts Currently Get Wrong

Direct answer: the most common published error in 2026 is California’s security deposit cap. Charts and AI-generated answers still report two months’ rent for an unfurnished unit and three months for a furnished one. Both figures were repealed effective July 1, 2024. The cap is one month’s rent.

California Civil Code § 1950.5(c)(1), as amended by Assembly Bill 12 (2023), reads: “a landlord shall not demand or receive security, however denominated, in an amount or value in excess of an amount equal to one month’s rent, in addition to any rent for the first month paid on or before initial occupancy.” There is no longer any furnished-versus-unfurnished distinction. A narrow exception at § 1950.5(c)(5)(A) lets a landlord who is a natural person, or a limited liability company whose members are all natural persons, and who owns no more than two residential rental properties containing no more than four units in total, collect up to two months — and that exception does not apply where the prospective tenant is a service member. Any chart publishing a flat two months for California is publishing repealed law.

The same class of error runs through the rest of the comparison-chart genre, and this rebuild corrects several errors that the previous version of this page carried. They are listed here rather than quietly fixed, because a statistics page that will not show its own corrections is asking for trust it has not earned:

• “States with a one-month limit: three.” Counted from the verified data, the figure is 15: AL, CA, DC, DE, HI, KS, MA, MD, ND, NE, NH, NM, NY, RI, SD. The old count of three predated California’s Assembly Bill 12 and Maryland’s move to one month in October 2024.
• “States with a two-month limit: fourteen, including California.” Counted, the figure is 10: AK, AR, CO, CT, GA, IA, ME, MO, PA, VA. California is not among them.
• “Twenty-two states have no statutory limit.” Counted, the figure is 21: FL, ID, IL, IN, KY, LA, MN, MS, MT, OH, OK, OR, SC, TN, TX, UT, VT, WA, WI, WV, WY.
• “Longest nonpayment notice: thirty days, Massachusetts” — which contradicted the old page’s own table, where Massachusetts showed fourteen days. The table was right. Massachusetts General Laws chapter 186, § 11 requires fourteen days’ notice to quit, and fourteen days is the longest verified nonpayment notice in the dataset, shared by 7 jurisdictions: MA, MN, NY, TN, VA, VT, WA.
• “Statewide rent control: three states — California, Oregon, New York.” New York does not have a statewide rent cap. Counted, 4 jurisdictions do: CA, DC, OR, WA. Washington’s cap is new — House Bill 1217, effective May 7, 2025 — and no chart that predates it will show it.
• “Eight states allow rent control — California, Oregon, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Minnesota, Maine, D.C.” That list is seven states plus a federal district, so the count and the label disagreed with each other. It also conflated three different regimes; the rent regulation section below separates them.
• Nonpayment notice shown as “Immediate” for Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia. Two of those four are simply wrong on the verified data: Georgia requires three business days under O.C.G.A. § 44-7-50(c), and Maryland requires ten days under Md. Code, Real Prop. § 8-401(c)(1). For the states that genuinely have no statutory day-count, “Immediate” is still the wrong word — it reads as “no process required,” which is false. That framing is corrected in the nonpayment section below.
• An “Original Research” badge over uncited third-party figures. The figures in this dataset are not our original research; they are statutes, and they belong to the legislatures that wrote them. What is ours is the verification work, the citation of each figure to its section, and the derived counts. The page is labeled accordingly.
• Unsourced ranking tables. The old page ranked the ten most tenant-friendly and the ten most landlord-friendly states with no methodology and no source. The index below is computed from the four verified columns using a published formula, and every component score is shown so the arithmetic can be checked.

The Master Table: All 51 Jurisdictions, Five Columns

Direct answer: this is the whole dataset in one table. Each cell shows the statutory rule as the statute states it, including its conditions — a conditional rule is never flattened into a single number, because a flattened conditional rule is a wrong answer. The statute column gives the section each figure was read in. Per-column tables with source tiers and the substantive nuance for each jurisdiction follow below.

All 51 jurisdictions, verified July 2026. Conditional rules are shown with their conditions. Statutory citations for every cell appear in the per-column tables below.

How Much Can a Landlord Charge for a Security Deposit?

Direct answer: it depends entirely on the state, and the largest group — 21 of 51 jurisdictions — sets no statutory ceiling at all. Where a ceiling exists, one month’s rent is the most common (15 jurisdictions), followed by two months (10). The highest statutory cap in the country is Nevada’s three months’ rent under Nev. Rev. Stat. § 118A.242(1).

Counted from the 51 verified deposit figures in the table below:

• No statutory limit — 21 jurisdictions: FL, ID, IL, IN, KY, LA, MN, MS, MT, OH, OK, OR, SC, TN, TX, UT, VT, WA, WI, WV, WY. In these states the amount is a matter of contract, though other rules (return deadlines, itemization, interest) still apply.
• One month’s rent — 15 jurisdictions: AL, CA, DC, DE, HI, KS, MA, MD, ND, NE, NH, NM, NY, RI, SD.
• One and a half months’ rent — 4 jurisdictions: AZ, MI, NC, NJ.
• Two months’ rent — 10 jurisdictions: AK, AR, CO, CT, GA, IA, ME, MO, PA, VA.
• Three months’ rent — 1 jurisdiction: NV.

Those five groups sum to 51, which is every jurisdiction in the dataset. The bucket is the leading cap in each rule; 8 of the caps carry an express statutory condition on top of it (AK, CT, DE, KS, NC, NE, NM, PA), and the table shows each rule in full rather than reducing it to the headline number. Kansas, for example, is one month for an unfurnished unit but one and a half for a furnished one, with another half-month permitted where there are pets, all under K.S.A. § 58-2550(a).

Security Deposit Caps by State, With Statutory Citations

Security deposit caps, 51 jurisdictions, verified July 2026. Column methodology: the figure is the statutory ceiling on the deposit a landlord may demand at the start of a residential tenancy, read in the cited section. It is not the move-in total and not the return deadline.

How Many Days Notice Must a Landlord Give Before Evicting for Unpaid Rent?

Direct answer: between three and fourteen days in the 47 jurisdictions that set a statutory day-count. Three days is the most common (16 jurisdictions) and fourteen days is the longest (7 jurisdictions: MA, MN, NY, TN, VA, VT, WA). Four jurisdictions — MO, NJ, SD, WV — set no statutory pre-suit day-count for nonpayment at all.

Counted from the 51 verified nonpayment figures:

• 3 days — 16 jurisdictions: AR, CA, CT, FL, GA, IA, ID, KS, MS, MT, ND, NM, OH, TX, UT, WY.
• 5 days — 8 jurisdictions: AZ, DE, IL, LA, OK, RI, SC, WI.
• 7 days — 8 jurisdictions: AK, AL, KY, ME, MI, NE, NH, NV.
• 10 days — 8 jurisdictions: CO, DC, HI, IN, MD, NC, OR, PA.
• 14 days — 7 jurisdictions: MA, MN, NY, TN, VA, VT, WA.
• No statutory day-count — 4 jurisdictions: MO, NJ, SD, WV.

The day-count also hides two things that matter more than the number. First, 4 jurisdictions count in business or judicial days rather than calendar days (AL, GA, NV, UT), which stretches a three-day notice across the better part of a week. California’s three days under Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 1161(2) expressly exclude Saturdays, Sundays, and judicial holidays, and Florida’s three days under Fla. Stat. § 83.56(3) exclude weekends and legal holidays. Second, some states run a grace period before the notice may issue at all: Connecticut’s notice is three days, but Conn. Gen. Stat. § 47a-15a(a) gives the tenant a nine-day grace period first, so the real wait is closer to twelve days than three. Rhode Island is the same shape — five days’ notice, but only after rent is fifteen days in arrears.

Nonpayment-of-Rent Notice Periods by State, With Statutory Citations

Nonpayment-of-rent notice, 51 jurisdictions, verified July 2026. Column methodology: the figure is the statutory pre-suit notice a landlord must give a residential tenant before filing an eviction for unpaid rent, read in the cited section. It is not the total eviction timeline, which depends on the court.

How Long Does a Tenant Have to Fix a Lease Violation?

Direct answer: the response window runs from zero to thirty days, and the single most common answer is that there is no statutory window at all — 11 jurisdictions (GA, IN, LA, ME, MI, MN, MO, NC, SD, WV, WY) give the tenant no statutory period to fix a non-rent breach. Where a window exists, fourteen days (9 jurisdictions) and ten days (7) are the most common, and thirty days (7) is the longest. Read the day-counts with care: in several more states the number is a notice-to-quit period rather than a right to cure, so the count of states denying a cure right is higher than 11 — see the distinction drawn below.

Counted from the 50 verified lease-violation figures:

• No statutory window — 11 jurisdictions: GA, IN, LA, ME, MI, MN, MO, NC, SD, WV, WY.
• 3 days — 5 jurisdictions: CA, ID, ND, TX, UT.
• 5 days — 2 jurisdictions: NV, WI.
• 7 days — 5 jurisdictions: AL, DE, FL, IA, NM.
• 10 days — 7 jurisdictions: AK, AZ, CO, HI, IL, OK, WA.
• 14 days — 9 jurisdictions: AR, KS, KY, MS, MT, NE, OR, SC, TN.
• 15 days — 2 jurisdictions: CT, PA.
• 20 days — 1 jurisdiction: RI.
• 21 days — 1 jurisdiction: VA.
• 30 days — 7 jurisdictions: DC, MD, NH, NJ, NY, OH, VT.

This is the column where a comparison chart is most likely to mislead, because two different legal things share one cell. A cure period is a right: the statute says the tenant may fix the breach and stay. A notice to quit is not a right: the statute says the landlord must wait a number of days before filing, but nothing the tenant does inside those days preserves the tenancy. Illinois, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wyoming all appear in this table with a day-count that is notice, not cure — and each row says so. Kansas, Nebraska, and Virginia split the difference with two clocks running at once: a cure window inside a longer termination window.

The 11 jurisdictions with no statutory window are not all alike either. Georgia has no statutory cure period for a non-rent breach, but O.C.G.A. § 44-7-50(a) still requires a demand for possession before a dispossessory affidavit may be filed. Massachusetts is the one figure in this dataset that is not verified, and it is instructive: Massachusetts appears to have no statutory cure period for non-rent breaches, but that conclusion rests on the absence of a provision across chapter 186 rather than on a number read in the text. An absence cannot be verified to the same standard as a figure, so the cell is marked not verified rather than published as a zero.

Lease-Violation Windows by State, With Statutory Citations

Lease-violation response windows, 50 verified figures of 51 jurisdictions, verified July 2026. Column methodology: the figure is the statutory window a tenant has to respond to a non-rent lease breach before the landlord may proceed — a cure right where the statute grants one, otherwise the notice window. Massachusetts is excluded from the counts as unverified.

How Much Notice Ends a Month-to-Month Tenancy?

Direct answer: thirty days is the standard across most of the country — 32 of the 43 jurisdictions with a flat rule. But the more important finding is that 4 jurisdictions (DC, NJ, OR, WA) no longer permit a landlord to end a periodic tenancy without cause at all, so for them there is no notice period to publish, and any chart that prints one for them is wrong.

Counted from the 51 verified month-to-month figures, which fall into four groups:

• No no-cause termination available — 4 jurisdictions: DC, NJ, OR, WA. Washington requires cause under Wash. Rev. Code § 59.18.650, with the notice running twenty to ninety days depending on which ground applies. Oregon permits a no-cause termination only in the first year of occupancy. New Jersey’s Anti-Eviction Act bars no-cause termination for most rentals, leaving the one-month rule for exempt units only. The District of Columbia has no landlord no-fault termination at all; its thirty-day rule is tenant-given.
• Scales with the length of the tenancy — 3 jurisdictions: CA, NY, VT. New York runs thirty, sixty, or ninety days under N.Y. Real Prop. Law § 226-c depending on how long the tenant has lived there; California is sixty days, dropping to thirty only where the tenant has been in the unit under a year; Vermont is sixty days for a tenancy of two years or less and ninety beyond that. These are ranges, not numbers, and they are not collapsed into a single bucket here.
• No statutory notice period — 1 jurisdiction: WY.
• A flat day-count — 43 jurisdictions, distributed as follows:

• 3 days — 1 jurisdiction: CT.
• 7 days — 1 jurisdiction: NC.
• 10 days — 1 jurisdiction: LA.
• 15 days — 2 jurisdictions: PA, UT.
• 21 days — 1 jurisdiction: CO.
• 28 days — 1 jurisdiction: WI.
• 30 days — 32 jurisdictions: AK, AL, AR, AZ, FL, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, MA, ME, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, ND, NE, NH, NM, NV, OH, OK, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, VA, WV.
• 45 days — 1 jurisdiction: HI.
• 60 days — 3 jurisdictions: DE, GA, MD.

Those four groups sum to 51. The flat-rule column has real spread at both ends: Connecticut’s three days under Conn. Gen. Stat. § 47a-23(a)(1)(A) is the shortest in the country, North Carolina’s seven days is next, and Delaware, Georgia, and Maryland require sixty. Two rules that look like thirty days are not quite: Massachusetts requires thirty days or one full rental period, whichever is longer, and Minnesota requires one full rental period measured by the interval between rent due dates. For an ordinary monthly tenancy both land on a month, but the rule is the interval, not the number.

Month-to-Month Termination Notice by State, With Statutory Citations

Month-to-month termination notice, 51 jurisdictions, verified July 2026. Column methodology: the figure is the notice a LANDLORD must give to end a periodic tenancy where no-cause termination is available. Tenant-given notice often differs and is noted per row where it does.

Which States Have Rent Control in 2026?

Direct answer: 4 jurisdictions have a statewide cap on rent increases — CA, DC, OR, WA. That is 3 states plus the District of Columbia. New York is not one of them, despite appearing on nearly every list. Local rent regulation is preempted outright in 30 jurisdictions, which is the far more common American rule.

Rent Control, Rent Stabilization, and Good Cause Are Three Different Things

Most of the confusion in this column comes from one word doing three jobs. Separating them is the whole answer:

• A statewide rent-increase cap limits how much rent may rise in a year across an entire state by statute. California’s is 5% plus the change in the cost of living, capped at 10%, whichever is lower (Cal. Civ. Code § 1947.12(a)(1), the Tenant Protection Act). Oregon’s is the lesser of 10% or 7% plus the regional consumer price index (Or. Rev. Stat. §§ 90.323, 90.324). Washington’s is 7% plus the index or 10%, whichever is less, with no increase permitted at all during the first twelve months of a tenancy (Wash. Rev. Code § 59.18.700(1)(a), enacted by House Bill 1217, effective May 7, 2025).
• Rent stabilization is a local or district-wide regime covering a defined set of older buildings, usually administered by a board that sets an annual adjustment. The District of Columbia’s is the clearest example: covered units get an adjustment of general applicability tied to the consumer price index for urban wage earners plus 2%, not to exceed 10% (D.C. Code § 42-3502.08(h)(2)(A)). New York City’s rent-stabilized stock under the Emergency Tenant Protection Act works the same way. Stabilization is not a statewide cap, because it does not reach the market-rate units next door.
• Good cause eviction is not a rent cap at all. New York’s Article 6-A, added in 2024, creates a rebuttable presumption that an increase above the local rent standard — the lower of the index plus 5%, or 10% — is unreasonable, but it operates as a defense to an eviction, and it applies automatically only in New York City and in municipalities that opt in by local law. A landlord may still ask for more; the tenant’s remedy is to resist eviction, not to have the increase voided by a cap. California has a parallel just-cause statute at Cal. Civ. Code § 1946.2 that is likewise separate from its rent cap.

Which is why “eight states allow rent control” was wrong twice over: it counted a federal district as a state, and it mixed a statewide cap (California, Oregon), a district-wide stabilization scheme (D.C.), a good-cause regime (New York), and states that merely decline to preempt their municipalities (New Jersey, Maryland, Minnesota, Maine) into one bucket. Declining to preempt is not the same as having rent control. It means the question is answered locally.

Preemption of Local Rent Regulation, Counted

Counted across all 51 jurisdictions:

• Local rent regulation preempted — 30 jurisdictions: AL, AR, AZ, CO, FL, GA, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, MA, MI, MO, MS, MT, NC, ND, NM, OH, OK, OR, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, WA, WI. These states forbid their own cities from adopting rent control.
• Not preempted — 10 jurisdictions: AK, CT, DC, HI, MD, ME, NY, PA, VT, WY. Here a municipality may regulate rents; whether any actually does is a local question this dataset does not answer.
• Partially preempted — 5 jurisdictions: CA, LA, MN, NE, NJ. California is the important one: the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act strips local rent control from single-family homes, condominiums, and anything with a certificate of occupancy issued after February 1, 1995, and mandates vacancy decontrol — but local rent control survives for older multifamily stock in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and Berkeley. The statewide cap is a floor; Costa-Hawkins is the ceiling on local power.
• Not verified — 6 jurisdictions: DE, NH, NV, RI, VA, WV. For these, no preemption statute was located and the absence could not be confirmed to the standard the rest of this dataset uses. They are reported as unverified rather than counted as “no.”

A caution on the cap figures themselves: California’s and Oregon’s and Washington’s caps are formulas containing a live index that resets annually and varies by region, so this page publishes the formula and not a hard-coded percentage. Any chart that prints a single number for California’s cap is publishing something that goes stale within a year. California’s Tenant Protection Act also carries a sunset — § 1947.12 is repealed as of January 1, 2030 — and a 2025 bill to tighten the formula and delete that sunset failed in committee, so both the formula and the sunset remain current law. For the notice rules that apply to an increase even where no cap does, see our rent increase laws by state guide.

Rent Regulation by State, With Statutory Citations

Rent regulation, 51 jurisdictions, verified July 2026. Column methodology: “statewide rent cap” means a statute limiting the amount of a rent increase across the whole jurisdiction. A local stabilization scheme, a good-cause eviction regime, and a notice-only rent-increase rule are none of them a statewide cap, and are not counted as one.

Which States Are Most Tenant-Protective? A Derived Index, With Its Formula

Direct answer: on a transparent index built only from the four verified statutory columns, the most tenant-protective jurisdictions are New York, District of Columbia, Maryland. The least are Louisiana, West Virginia, Wyoming. This measures statutory text and nothing else — it is not a measure of how evictions actually go.

The previous version of this page published a “top ten most tenant-friendly” and a “top ten most landlord-friendly” list with no methodology and no source, which is indistinguishable from making it up. This index is the replacement. It is arithmetic on the verified columns, the formula is published, and every component score is in the table so you can recompute any row yourself.

The Formula

Four components, each normalized to a zero-to-one-hundred scale, then averaged with equal weight. Higher means the statute gives the tenant more protection:

1. Nonpayment notice = days of statutory pre-suit notice divided by fourteen, the longest in the dataset, times one hundred. No statutory day-count scores zero.
2. Lease-violation window = days of statutory response window divided by thirty, the longest in the dataset, times one hundred. No statutory window scores zero.
3. Month-to-month termination = days of landlord notice divided by ninety, times one hundred. A jurisdiction that bars no-cause termination outright scores one hundred, because no notice period is available to the landlord at any length. A jurisdiction with no statutory notice period scores zero. A rule that scales with the tenancy is scored at its longest tier, and the full range is shown in the month-to-month table above.
4. Security deposit cap = one hundred for a one-month cap, seventy-five for one and a half months, fifty for two months, twenty-five for three months, zero for no statutory cap. A lower statutory ceiling means more protection.

What the Index Deliberately Is Not

It is not a measure of whether a state is a good place to be a landlord or a tenant. It ignores court speed, filing fees, sheriff scheduling, local ordinances, habitability enforcement, deposit return deadlines, and every other column this dataset does not verify. Two jurisdictions can score identically and behave nothing alike. It is also not weighted by importance — the four components are averaged equally because any other weighting would be our opinion dressed as data, and the whole argument of this page is against that. Read it as one arithmetic summary of four statutory numbers, and read the tables for anything that matters.

1 jurisdiction is not scored: Massachusetts, because one of its four input figures is not verified. Scoring it would mean inventing the missing input, so it is left out and said so. That leaves 50 scored jurisdictions.

Statutory Tenant-Protection Index, 50 scored jurisdictions, computed July 2026 from the four verified columns on this page. Component scores are shown so every row can be recomputed from the formula above.

What Changed in 2024, 2025, and 2026

Direct answer: the deposit-cap column moved the most. California cut its cap to one month effective July 1, 2024; Maryland cut its cap to one month effective October 1, 2024; Georgia created a two-month cap where it previously had none, effective July 1, 2024. Washington enacted the country’s newest statewide rent cap effective May 7, 2025. Any chart older than that is wrong in at least four places.

Amendment tracking is where a stale chart does the most damage, because a repealed figure looks exactly like a current one. The research behind this dataset recorded 108 amendment findings across 35 jurisdictions, including deliberate negative findings — bills that did not pass but are widely reported as if they had. The changes that move a figure in this dataset are these:

• California, deposit cap, effective July 1, 2024. Assembly Bill 12 cut the cap from two months (unfurnished) or three months (furnished) to one month for both, with a narrow small-landlord exception. Cal. Civ. Code § 1950.5(c)(1).
• Maryland, deposit cap, effective October 1, 2024. The Renters’ Rights and Stabilization Act of 2024 cut the cap from two months to one. It applies to leases signed on or after that date, so the two-month cap still governs earlier leases. Md. Code, Real Prop. § 8-203(b)(1).
• Georgia, deposit cap, effective July 1, 2024. House Bill 404, the Safe at Home Act, created a two-month cap at O.C.G.A. § 44-7-30.1 where Georgia previously had none. The same act added a three-business-day notice before a dispossessory affidavit for nonpayment, and a statutory duty of habitability. Aggregators still widely publish “no statutory limit” for Georgia.
• Washington, statewide rent cap, effective May 7, 2025. House Bill 1217 created Washington’s first statewide cap at Wash. Rev. Code § 59.18.700 and raised the rent-increase notice from sixty to ninety days. Any table listing Washington as having no statewide cap is now wrong.
• Colorado, deposit cap, effective January 1, 2026. House Bill 25-1249 expanded the definition of normal wear and tear, voided lease clauses charging tenants for it, and imposed treble damages for wrongful retention. It did not change the two-month cap at C.R.S. § 38-12-102.5, which is why this dataset still reports two months for Colorado.
• Hawaii, nonpayment notice, effective February 5, 2026. Act 278 (2025) changed the nonpayment notice from five business days to ten calendar days and added a mediation pilot. Nearly every published chart still shows five business days. Haw. Rev. Stat. § 521-68(a).
• Oregon, nonpayment notice, 2023. House Bill 2001 replaced the seventy-two-hour notice with ten days and the one-hundred-forty-four-hour notice with thirteen. Major legal publishers were still serving the repealed seventy-two-hour text when this dataset was verified. Or. Rev. Stat. § 90.394(2)(a).
• District of Columbia, nonpayment notice, effective December 31, 2025. D.C. Law 26-80 cut the nonpayment notice from thirty days to ten and added a dual service requirement. This is the single most likely stale figure for the District in any chart. D.C. Code § 42-3505.01(a-1)(1).
• Virginia, nonpayment notice, effective July 1, 2026. The 2026 acts extended the nonpayment notice from five days to fourteen. A codified version restoring five days is scheduled for the later of July 1, 2028 or seven years after the COVID-19 emergency expires, so this figure has a known expiry. Va. Code Ann. § 55.1-1245(F).
• South Dakota, nonpayment notice, effective July 1, 2024. SL 2024, ch 75 repealed the three-day notice to quit at SDCL 21-16-2 outright. Most charts and AI answers have not caught this and still publish a three-day notice for South Dakota.
• Minnesota, nonpayment notice, effective January 1, 2024. The fourteen-day pre-suit notice at Minn. Stat. § 504B.321, subd. 1a took effect. Before that, Minnesota had no statutory pre-suit demand at all — the eviction action itself was the demand. Any source predating 2024 shows Minnesota as a no-notice state and is now wrong.
• Rhode Island, rent-increase notice, effective June 24, 2024. Notice extended to sixty days, and to one hundred twenty days for month-to-month tenants over sixty-two. This is notice only; Rhode Island still has no cap on the amount.

Bills That Did Not Pass but Are Reported as If They Did

These are recorded deliberately, because a negative finding is the only thing that stops the same error being re-imported later:

• Connecticut. House Bill 6891 (2025) would have capped all deposits at one month’s rent. It died in committee on June 4, 2025. Multiple summaries report it as enacted. Connecticut’s cap remains two months, or one month for tenants sixty-two and over.
• New Mexico. House Bill 6 (2023) would have replaced the three-day nonpayment notice with eleven days. It did not become law. Several secondary sources describe the eleven-day language as if it were in force. New Mexico’s figure is three days.
• Georgia. The Senior Stabilization Act, which would have capped increases at 10% for tenants sixty-two and over, died in committee on March 28, 2024.
• Mississippi. House Bill 1369 (2025) would have cut the fourteen-day cure period to seven days. It died in committee. Any source reporting a seven-day Mississippi cure period is wrong.
• North Dakota. House Bill 1272 (2025) would have amended the deposit statute. It failed on second reading, forty-one to forty-seven. The cap remains one month.
• California. Assembly Bill 1157 (2025-2026) would have cut the rent cap to 2% plus the index and deleted the 2030 sunset. It did not advance out of committee, so both the current formula and the sunset remain law.
• Colorado. The introduced draft of House Bill 21-1121 proposed raising the ten-day nonpayment demand and cure period to fourteen days. That language was stripped before passage. Both periods remain ten days.

Two changes are enacted but not yet operative, and are reported here as such rather than folded into the figures: the District of Columbia’s pet security deposit of up to 15% of monthly rent (D.C. Law 25-308) is subject to appropriations and the D.C. Law Library marks it not funded and not implemented, so it is not live law despite wide reporting to the contrary; and Louisiana’s 2026 Act 63 extends the deposit return deadline effective August 1, 2026 without creating a cap.

What This Dataset Could Not Confirm

Direct answer: one figure of 204 is unverified — the Massachusetts lease-violation cure period — and it is rendered as “Not verified” rather than filled in. Beyond that, 216 research notes record limits on what could be confirmed, and the honest ones are worth stating.

A statistics page earns its authority by what it refuses to publish. The specific limits:

• An absence is not a figure. Massachusetts appears to have no statutory cure period for non-rent lease breaches: the cure rights in chapter 186 run only to nonpayment, and § 11A is confined to commercial premises. But that conclusion rests on reviewing the section list and finding nothing, which is a weaker operation than reading a number. It is marked unverified for that reason alone, and an attorney should confirm it before it is relied on.
• Formulas are not numbers. The California, Oregon, and Washington rent caps contain a consumer price index component that resets annually and varies by region. This page publishes the formula. Any single percentage would be stale within a year.
• Rolling exemptions cannot be tabled. California’s Tenant Protection Act exempts housing with a certificate of occupancy issued within the previous fifteen years — a rolling window, so which buildings are covered changes every year. Whether a particular unit is subject to the statewide cap, a stricter local ordinance, or neither is unit-specific and cannot be flattened into a cell.
• Statewide defaults are defaults. Every figure here is the statewide rule. Local ordinances override it in a great many places, and Kentucky’s landlord-tenant act applies only in the localities that have adopted it, which is why the Kentucky rows carry that qualifier.
• Six preemption cells are unverified. For 6 jurisdictions (DE, NH, NV, RI, VA, WV) no preemption statute was located. Absence of a located statute is not proof of absence, so those are reported as unverified rather than as “no.”
• One deposit figure sits at a lower tier. The District of Columbia’s one-month cap lives in the municipal regulations (14 DCMR § 308.2) rather than the D.C. Code, and was read at a secondary rendering. It is labeled Tier 3 in the table.
• Currency checks were not possible everywhere. Some states publish their code only through JavaScript applications that could not be read, so the currency of those figures rests on dated renderings rather than a state-hosted check. Where that is true, the row says so.

None of this makes the dataset unusable. It makes it a dataset with a known perimeter, which is the only kind worth citing. Verify anything you are about to act on against the statute itself — the citation for every figure is in the tables above precisely so that you can.

Landlord-Tenant Law Statistics: Frequently Asked Questions

How much can a landlord charge for a security deposit?

It depends on the state. Counted across the 51 jurisdictions in this dataset, 21 set no statutory ceiling at all, 15 cap the deposit at one month’s rent, 4 at one and a half months, 10 at two months, and one (Nevada) at three months under Nev. Rev. Stat. § 118A.242(1). California’s cap is one month’s rent under Cal. Civ. Code § 1950.5(c)(1), not the two or three months most charts still publish.

Which states have no security deposit limit?

21 of the 51 jurisdictions set no statutory cap on the security deposit amount: FL, ID, IL, IN, KY, LA, MN, MS, MT, OH, OK, OR, SC, TN, TX, UT, VT, WA, WI, WV, WY. In those states the amount is a matter of contract, though other statutory rules — itemization, return deadlines, interest — still apply.

How many days notice must a landlord give for nonpayment of rent?

Between three and fourteen days in the 47 jurisdictions with a statutory day-count. Three days is the most common, in 16 jurisdictions. Fourteen days is the longest, in 7: MA, MN, NY, TN, VA, VT, WA. Four jurisdictions (MO, NJ, SD, WV) set no statutory pre-suit day-count for nonpayment, which does not mean no process is required — a written demand, a just-cause regime, or a court filing still applies.

Which states have rent control?

4 jurisdictions have a statewide cap on rent increases: CA, DC, OR, WA — that is 3 states plus the District of Columbia. New York is not among them: its Good Cause Eviction law is an eviction defence with local opt-in, not a statewide rent cap. Local rent regulation is preempted outright in 30 jurisdictions.

What is the difference between rent control and rent stabilization?

A statewide rent cap limits increases across an entire state by statute, as in California, Oregon, and Washington. Rent stabilization covers a defined set of usually older buildings in one city or district, with a board setting the annual adjustment — the District of Columbia and New York City are the main examples. Good cause eviction is a third thing again: it is a defence to eviction, not a cap. Conflating them is why published rent-control counts disagree with each other.

How much notice must a landlord give to end a month-to-month tenancy?

Thirty days is the standard in most states. But 4 jurisdictions (DC, NJ, OR, WA) no longer permit a landlord to end a periodic tenancy without cause at all, so no notice period applies to them, and three (California, New York, Vermont) scale the notice with how long the tenant has lived there. Connecticut’s three days is the shortest flat rule in the country; Delaware, Georgia, and Maryland require sixty.

Can a landlord evict a tenant without going to court?

No, in every jurisdiction in this dataset. Changing the locks, removing a tenant’s belongings, or shutting off utilities to force a move-out is self-help eviction, and it is unlawful everywhere in the United States regardless of how far behind the rent is. Even the four states with no statutory nonpayment notice period require a court process. Self-help typically exposes the landlord to statutory damages and can convert a winnable eviction into a losing case.

How long does a tenant have to fix a lease violation?

From zero to thirty days. 11 jurisdictions (GA, IN, LA, ME, MI, MN, MO, NC, SD, WV, WY) give no statutory window for a non-rent breach at all. Where a window exists, fourteen and ten days are the most common and thirty is the longest. Read the column carefully: some day-counts are a cure right, meaning the tenant may fix the breach and stay, and others are only a notice period before filing, which the tenant cannot cure their way out of.

Can a landlord raise the rent as much as they want?

In most of the country, yes, subject to giving the required notice. Only 4 jurisdictions cap the amount statewide (CA, DC, OR, WA). 30 jurisdictions preempt their cities from capping it locally. Elsewhere the limits are notice-based: Rhode Island, for example, requires sixty days’ notice of an increase (one hundred twenty for tenants over sixty-two) but places no limit on the amount.

What is the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act?

A model statute published in 1972 to standardize residential landlord-tenant law across the states. Roughly half adopted a version of it, which is why states as different as Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Carolina share recognizably similar notice structures and deposit rules. Kentucky is the instructive case: its act applies only in localities that have adopted it, so the Kentucky figures in this dataset carry that qualifier.

Which states are most tenant-friendly?

Any answer to this is only as good as its methodology, which is why this page publishes one. On an index computed from four verified statutory columns — nonpayment notice, lease-violation window, month-to-month termination, and deposit cap, equally weighted — the highest-scoring jurisdictions are New York, District of Columbia, Maryland. The index measures statutory text only. It says nothing about court speed, enforcement, or how an eviction actually goes, and any ranking claiming to measure those without publishing a method should be treated with suspicion.

How often does this dataset change?

Constantly, which is the point. The figures here were verified in July 2026. In the 2024 to 2026 window alone, California, Maryland, and Georgia moved their deposit caps, Washington created a statewide rent cap, Hawaii and the District of Columbia and Virginia and Minnesota changed nonpayment notice periods, and South Dakota repealed its notice to quit outright. Verify against the cited statute before acting; the citation is in the table for exactly that reason.

Related State Law Guides and Comparisons

• Security deposit laws by state – the deposit column in depth, including return deadlines.
• Rent increase laws by state – notice periods and the limits on raising rent.
• Habitability laws by state – what a landlord must maintain, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
• Tenant screening laws by state – what you may check before renting.
• How to screen tenants step by step – the process the figures above assume.
• How to verify tenant income – the financial half of a defensible application.
• Fair Housing Act guide for landlords – the federal baseline that applies in all fifty-one jurisdictions.

Screen Every Applicant to the Same Standard

The statutes above tell you what you may do. Screening tells you who you are renting to. Order FCRA-ready credit, criminal, and eviction reports and rent with confidence in any state.

Start Tenant Screening Compare Report Options

About This Dataset

Compiled and verified by Tenant Screening Background Check · Editorial Team

Established 2004. Our editorial team has spent two decades helping landlords and property managers run lawful, FCRA-compliant tenant screening across all fifty states. The statutes on this page are not our research – they belong to the legislatures that wrote them. The verification, the citation of each figure to its section, the source tiering, and the derived counts are ours, and every one of them is checkable against the citation in the table.

Figures last verified July 2026 · Updated 2026

Legal Disclaimer

This page is for general informational purposes only and is not legal advice. Landlord-tenant statutes change frequently – several figures on this page changed during 2024, 2025 and 2026 – and how a rule applies depends on your specific facts, your local ordinances, and the type of unit. Every figure carries its statutory citation so that you can verify it at the source before you act on it. Before acting on any deposit, notice, eviction, or rent question, consult a licensed attorney in the relevant jurisdiction. Reading this page does not create an attorney-client relationship.