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is why so many of them still show California capping security deposits at two months’ rent — a rule the legislature repealed effective July 1, 2024.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.

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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