Ordinance · May 29, 2026 · 6 min
Five rules changed for LA tenants in 2026.
Here's what each one does.
The City Council and the State legislature rewrote tenant rules five times between August and February. Each one in plain English below.
The LA City Council passed three changes to the Rent Stabilization Ordinance that take effect February 2, 2026. The State legislature added a new appliance rule that took effect January 1, 2026. And a Right to Counsel notice rule that started in August 2025 keeps tripping up landlords who haven’t read it yet.
Five rule changes in six months. Below is what each one does, the statute it lives in, and what it means if you’re the tenant.
The annual rent cap formula got rewritten.
The LA Rent Stabilization Ordinance lives at LAMC §151.06. It tells landlords how much they can raise rent every twelve months on RSO-covered units. The City Council changed how that number gets calculated.
Under the old formula, the cap moved with 100% of the Consumer Price Index, with a floor of 3% and a ceiling of 8%.
Under the new formula, effective February 2, 2026, the cap moves with 90% of the CPI, with a floor of 1% and a ceiling of 4%.
The ceiling dropped from 8% to 4%. The floor dropped from 3% to 1%. Both bands narrowed.
Two things to know before this matters to you. First, the current RSO rate is locked at 3% from July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2027. The new formula doesn’t kick in until the next rate-setting cycle. Second, the formula sets a maximum. Your lease and your unit’s specific exemptions still drive what your landlord can actually do.
Landlords can’t tack utility costs onto the annual rent increase anymore.
For years, LA RSO let landlords add a small percentage to the annual rent increase when they covered some or all of the tenant’s utility bills. That add-on is going away.
Effective February 2, 2026 (pending final Council approval), the RSO annual rent increase cannot include any additional percentage for utilities. The cap is the cap.
If your landlord has been folding a utility surcharge into your annual increase, that line is no longer permitted starting with any increase that takes effect on or after February 2, 2026. Increases already in place stand. Future increases reset to the formula above, without the utility line.
What this looks like in practice. Check the next rent-increase notice you receive after February 2. If the notice itemizes the increase as "RSO cap plus utility add-on" or similar, the math has to redo. The new total can’t be higher than what LAMC §151.06 alone permits.
Landlords can no longer charge an extra 10% for an added dependent.
Under the old RSO rules, if a tenant added a new dependent to the lease (a child or someone the tenant supports financially), the landlord could raise the rent by up to 10% on top of the annual increase. Effective February 2, 2026, that surcharge is gone.
The change applies only to dependents. The +10% for an additional adult tenant added to the tenancy is still permitted. That distinction matters. A new roommate is still a billable change. A child or a financially-dependent family member is not.
If your landlord raised the rent on you in 2025 for an added child, that increase isn’t retroactively void. But going forward, the same charge will be improper on any new increase that takes effect after February 2, 2026.
California now requires every rental unit to have a working stove and refrigerator.
State Assembly Bill 628 took effect January 1, 2026. It applies to every rental unit in California. New leases, amended leases, renewed leases.
Under AB 628, the landlord has to provide and maintain an operational stove and an operational refrigerator. If either is missing or broken, the LA Housing Department can issue a Notice to Comply. The landlord has at least 30 days to fix it. Missing the deadline brings administrative penalties (fines, hearings, further action under LAHD rules).
This is a real lever. Before AB 628, California habitability law at Civil Code §1941 didn’t specifically name stoves and refrigerators. Tenants with a broken stove had to argue it through general habitability standards, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.
Now the appliance is named in the statute. Notify your landlord in writing if your stove or fridge is broken or missing. Cite AB 628. If nothing happens in a reasonable window, file a complaint with LAHD.
Every eviction notice now has to come with a Right to Counsel disclosure.
The City of LA partnered with Stay Housed LA to run a Right to Counsel program. Tenants who get served an unlawful detainer complaint can get free legal representation if they meet the income criteria.
The program isn’t new. The disclosure rule is.
As of August 20, 2025, landlords have to provide a Notice of Right to Counsel in five places:
- At the start of every new tenancy, in the tenant’s primary language.
- Attached to every eviction notice served on the tenant.
- Attached to every notice that terminates a rental housing subsidy (Section 8).
- Attached to administrative correspondence that could lead to subsidy termination.
- Posted in a common area of the building.
If a landlord serves an eviction notice or a subsidy termination without the Right to Counsel disclosure attached, the notice has a procedural defect. Defective notices can be challenged. That has stopped evictions in the past.
If you got an eviction notice and there was no Right to Counsel disclosure attached, save the envelope, save the date you received it, and save a copy of everything inside. That matters.
Five changes in six months. None of them are a complete rewrite of LA tenant law. Each one shifts the math by a percentage point, names a new appliance, or adds a sentence to a notice.
That’s how tenant law usually changes. Slowly. By small pieces that most people don’t read.
The firm will keep reading. Future Dispatches will cover the next ones as they hit.