Free Santa Monica Residential Lease Agreement

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A configurable Santa Monica residential lease agreement that generates a signable multi-page PDF. Built to the Rent Control Charter Amendment itself — the three-part coverage test, the general adjustment the Charter caps at 3%, the two separate registration systems, and the one-year written unfurnished lease Municipal Code 6.22 requires.

Santa Monica Charter art. XVIII Just Cause Free PDF 2026 Edition

A Santa Monica residential lease agreement is a California lease with a second body of law sitting on top of it — and in Santa Monica that second body is not an ordinance. Rent control here lives in the City Charter, in Article XVIII, adopted by the voters on 10 April 1979, with a second charter article, Article XXIII, added by the voters in 2010 to give just-cause protection to the units Article XVIII does not reach. A charter provision cannot be amended by the City Council; only the electorate can touch it. On top of those two sit the Rent Control Board’s own regulations, where most of the operative detail actually lives, and nine chapters of the Municipal Code that between them decide what a Santa Monica lease may say, how long it must run, whether the unit may be furnished, and what has to be handed over at signing. The single most important thing to understand, and the thing every template in circulation gets wrong, is that Santa Monica runs three separate coverage tests on the same unit, and they routinely give different answers. This page states each test explicitly, builds them into the form as field-driven branches, and then covers what the law requires of the lease document itself. For the statewide layer, see our California residential lease agreement, which derives every state figure from the statute; this page does not repeat it.

Start here, because this is the question that decides the rent — and only the rent. Charter Section 1801(c) defines controlled rental units as all residential rental units in the City of Santa Monica, including mobile homes and mobile home spaces and trailers and trailer spaces, except single-family homes to the extent provided in Section 1815 and those units the Board finds exempt under one of seven listed provisions. The seven are narrower than most summaries suggest, and the last of them is procedural rather than substantive.

• Section 1801(c)(1) — rental units in hotels, motels, inns, tourist homes and rooming and boarding houses which are rented primarily to transient guests for a period of less than fourteen days. Board Regulation 12051 makes the test evidential: the applicant must produce occupancy records from 1 January 1979 to the present, and must document the transient occupancy taxes paid to the City.
• Section 1801(c)(2) — rental units in any hospital, convent, monastery, extended medical care facility, asylum, non-profit home for the aged, or dormitory owned and operated by an institution of higher education. Regulation 12052 narrows two of those words: an extended medical care facility means a skilled nursing facility licensed under Title 22 of the California Administrative Code, and expressly does not include a community care facility or an alcohol or drug rehabilitation or detoxification centre.
• Section 1801(c)(3) — units a government unit, agency or authority owns, operates or manages, or in which governmentally subsidised tenants reside, only if applicable federal or state law or administrative regulation specially exempts such units from municipal rent control. The qualifier is doing the work: without a provision that specially exempts, the unit is controlled.
• Section 1801(c)(4) — rental units in owner-occupied dwellings with no more than three units, where “owner” means a natural person who owns a 50% ownership interest in the building and resides on the property as a principal place of residence. The exemption expires by operation of law when the owner ceases to reside there, and thereafter all units on the property are subject to the whole Article again.
• Section 1801(c)(5) — rental units and dwellings constructed after the adoption of this Article, that is after 10 April 1979. The subsection then adds a sentence most summaries drop: “this exemption does not apply to units created as a result of conversion as opposed to new construction.”
• Section 1801(c)(6) — a unit actually used, on a non-profit basis, for child care or other residential social services. This exemption expires when the use ceases, applies only to units as they become vacant, and expressly does not authorise the eviction of any tenant or the charging of rent above what the Article permits.
• Section 1801(c)(7) — the procedural provision: exemptions “are not automatic but shall be granted by the Board upon application by the owner”, with a completed application deemed approved if the Board does not act within ninety days.

Single-family homes have their own rule and it is not a blanket exemption. Charter Section 1815 provides that a single-family home not used for residential rental purposes on 1 July 1984 is automatically exempt. One that was so used is “subject to all requirements of this Article” until the Board permanently exempts it on proof that the home has been continuously occupied by the owner as a principal place of residence for two years after a voluntary vacancy or a lawful eviction — and an owner may hold only one such exemption at a time.

The condominium trap runs the other way from what people expect. Charter Section 1801(n) defines “single family home” for Article XVIII purposes to include a lawfully created condominium, stock cooperative or similar unit that is part of a larger residential structure — but it excepts those condominiums and stock cooperatives converted after 10 April 1979 for which no removal permit or vested-right determination has been issued by the Board. A post-1979 conversion without a Board permit is therefore a controlled rental unit, with the full rent ceiling and the full Section 1806 just-cause protection, notwithstanding that it is a condominium.

Because they come from two different charter articles, adopted thirty-one years apart, with two different definitions of what they reach. Article XVIII, adopted in 1979, does both jobs for the units it covers: Sections 1804 and 1805 set the rent ceiling, and Section 1806 requires just cause. Article XXIII, approved by the voters at the 2 November 2010 election, does only the second job, and does it for almost everything Article XVIII leaves out.

The findings the voters adopted in Charter Section 2301 say why in terms: “tenants living in uncontrolled units currently have no protections against unjust evictions, including evictions based on relatively minor and correctable violations of rental agreements.” Article XXIII was written to close that gap, and it closed it by defining its own scope in the widest possible way. Section 2302(a) reaches all residential rental units in the City except two categories: those subject to Article XVIII, and single-family homes.

Its own exemption list, at Section 2303, is short — four entries, and they mirror the first three plus the child-care entry from Article XVIII: transient lodging rented primarily for under fourteen days; hospitals, convents, monasteries, extended medical care facilities, asylums, non-profit homes for seniors and college dormitories; government-owned or subsidised units where federal or state law specially exempts them; and units used on a non-profit basis for child care or other residential social services. Notice what is not there. There is no new-construction exemption in Article XXIII. There is no owner-occupied-triplex exemption. A 2015 apartment building in Santa Monica is outside the rent ceiling and squarely inside just-cause control.

The safety property, stated plainly, because it is what a lease has to get right. If the unit is exempt from the rent ceiling, the lease must still say which protections survive — and in Santa Monica a great many of them do. Just cause survives under Article XXIII unless the dwelling is a single-family home. The lease-form rules in Municipal Code Chapter 6.22 survive in every case, because that chapter never mentions rent control. The tenant harassment ordinance survives, because Section 4.56.010(h) defines its reach by reference to both charter articles. The buyout rules survive on the same definition at Section 4.57.020(a). The algorithmic rent-setting ban survives on the same definition again at Section 4.58.010. The relocation code survives on a definition that is broader than either, reaching any housing unit in the City regardless of permit status. And since 1 January 2026 the City’s own registration duty attaches precisely because the unit is outside Article XVIII. The generated lease prints the surviving protections in every branch, and refuses to print a bare “this unit is exempt”.

At the rent, and nowhere else — and Santa Monica’s own instruments say so on their face rather than leaving it to be inferred. The Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, California Civil Code Sections 1954.50 to 1954.535, pre-empts local control of the rent that may be charged for separately alienable dwellings and for units first certified for occupancy after 1 February 1995, and requires vacancy decontrol. It says nothing about the grounds on which possession may be recovered.

Three Santa Monica provisions record that boundary in their own words. Charter Section 1804(b) provides that for tenancies commencing on or after 1 January 1999 “which qualify for a vacancy rent increase pursuant to state law”, the base rent ceiling is the initial rental rate — a local rule written around the state one. Regulation 3301(a) permits the new base rent after a qualifying vacancy “pursuant to Section 1954.50 et seq. of the Civil Code” and then adds, in the same regulation, that the unit “shall otherwise remain controlled by and subject to all sections of Article XVIII and the regulations of the Rent Control Board.” And Regulation 11201(a) removes the registration fee, and only the fee, from a unit whose rents are decontrolled by Civil Code Section 1954.52(a). Not one of them touches Section 1806.

Two consequences follow that no template states. First, a Costa-Hawkins vacancy increase does not make a Santa Monica unit uncontrolled; it resets the base rent and leaves the general adjustment, the registration duty, the just-cause grounds and the notice-filing duties exactly where they were. Second, the fee waiver under Regulation 11201 is not automatic either: Regulation 11201(b) makes it available only where the tenancy commenced on or after 1 January 1996, the prior tenancy was not ended by the owner by a Civil Code 1946.1 notice or a Civil Code 827 change of terms, and the unit carries no serious health, safety, fire or building code violation cited and left unabated for six months or longer before the tenancy.

Because it changes who can amend it, who runs it, and what happens if a court strikes part of it down. This is a genuine structural difference from every other rent-control city in California, and no template states it.

Only the voters can amend it. Article XVIII was adopted on 10 April 1979 and the Charter prints its own amendment history by election date: amended 6 November 1984; Section 1820 adopted 6 November 1990; Sections 1800, 1801(d), 1804(b), 1806 and 1821 amended or adopted 5 November 2002; Section 1806 amended 2 November 2010; Sections 1803(g), 1804(b) and 1805 amended 6 November 2012; Section 1803(n) amended 4 November 2014; and Sections 1803(d), 1804(a), 1805(a) and 1806(a)(8) amended 8 November 2022. Every one of those is a ballot measure. Article XXIII was likewise “Approved by the voters at the 11/2/2010 election”, a line printed under each of its nine sections.

The Board is elected and is not the Council’s creature. Charter Section 1803(a) establishes a Rent Control Board of five elected Commissioners serving four-year terms, limited to two full terms. Section 1802 then insulates it: the Board “shall exercise its powers and duties under this Article independent of and without interference from the City Council, City Manager, and City Attorney”; the Council and Manager “shall have no authority to oversee, supervise, or approve” its budget; the Council “shall have no power to abolish positions established or classified by the Board”, notwithstanding any other section of the Charter; and the Board may retain its own private attorneys without Council approval. Charter Section 1803(k) even fixes Commissioner compensation at seventy-five dollars a meeting with an annual ceiling.

If a provision is struck down, the Board writes the replacement. Charter Section 1802(e) is unusual and worth quoting: if any portion of the Article is declared invalid or unenforceable by a court, or rendered invalid by state or federal legislation, “the Board and not the City Council shall have authority to enact replacement regulations consistent with the intent and purpose of the invalidated provision and applicable law”, and those regulations supersede the invalidated text to the extent necessary.

What that does and does not buy. It does not put the Charter beyond state pre-emption — a charter provision is still subordinate to a state statute in a field the Legislature has occupied, which is why Costa-Hawkins reaches Santa Monica at all. What it does mean is that the parts of Santa Monica law a lease depends on move at two entirely different speeds. The Charter changes only at a municipal election. The ordinances in Municipal Code Chapters 4.25, 4.27, 4.28, 4.36, 4.44, 4.56, 4.57, 4.58 and 6.22 change whenever the Council passes an ordinance, and several of them did recently: Chapter 4.58 in June 2025, Chapter 4.25 in November 2025, and amendments to Chapters 4.27, 4.36, 4.56 and 4.57 in February 2024. This page dates each of them for that reason.

No, and assuming otherwise is the most expensive mistake a Santa Monica owner can make. Charter Section 1801(c)(7) is explicit: exemptions “are not automatic but shall be granted by the Board upon application by the owner pursuant to Board rules”. Regulation 12000 states the same rule from the other end: a property “shall not be considered exempt from the Rent Control Law until the owner of said property has applied for, and received, a determination by the Rent Control Board that such property is exempt”, and every exemption is prospectively effective from the grant.

Regulation 12053 sets out what the commonest application — the three-or-fewer-unit owner-occupied exemption — actually requires. A completed application on the Board’s form, accompanied by a grant deed or other proof of the ownership interest, documentation that the property had three or fewer units on 10 April 1979, and a processing fee of one hundred dollars. Staff have five business days to decide whether the application is complete; an application not rejected within that window is considered filed on the sixth business day, and the ninety-day clock starts then. The owner must prove a 50% interest held since filing, the unit count as at April 1979, and continuous residence at the property as a principal place of residence beginning at least one hundred twenty days before the application was filed. The Board mails a copy to every unit at the property with a tenant response form, and any disputed fact sends the matter to a hearing examiner with an on-site staff inspection.

And the exemption has to be renewed, in effect, every year. Regulation 12070(c) requires the owner of a property exempt under Section 1801(c)(4) to certify annually, under penalty of perjury, that they continue to occupy the property as a principal residence. Failing to return the signed certification within thirty days of its mailing is itself sufficient evidence for an initial determination that the exemption has lapsed. Regulation 12073 separately requires the owner to notify the Board in writing within fourteen days when the exempt use ends, when the owner stops living there, or on a transfer of ownership. Regulation 12070(h) adds a humane exception: the death of the owner in whose name the exemption was granted creates an irrebuttable presumption that the underlying facts are no longer true, unless a surviving spouse held at least a 50% interest and otherwise qualifies.

Two further points from the regulations that a landlord relying on an exemption should know. Regulation 12056(f) provides that granting an exemption does not relieve the applicant of registration fees and penalties that accrued before the exemption was filed. And Regulation 12052 records, for the social-services exemption, that granting it “shall not in any way deprive the then current residents of the effected property of any of the protections contained in the Charter Amendment”, naming the Section 1806 good-cause provisions and the Sections 1805 and 1809 maximum-allowable-rent provisions specifically. An exemption granted over a sitting tenant is not a reset button.

Eight steps, and the second one is the one that decides everything else. The builder asks the coverage questions before it asks about rent, because the answers change what the lease has to say about notices, increases, registration and termination.

Everything you fill is written into the document, and the generated lease cites the controlling Charter section, Board regulation or Municipal Code section at each point rather than describing it vaguely. Before handing over keys, run proper tenant screening — the lease governs the relationship, screening decides whether you want it, and in Santa Monica the decision to start a tenancy is far easier than the decision to end one. Pair the signed lease with a California move-in / move-out checklist, because the itemized accounting owed in twenty-one days rests on documented condition, and in Santa Monica a disputed reduction in housing services is decided on the same evidence before the Rent Control Board.