Habitability & Repair Laws by State

A 50-state comparison for residential rentals, with every state verified against official sources — the statutes, and, where the duty comes from the courts, the opinions themselves — plus the layer most summaries miss: the cities that impose their own habitability standards, deadlines, and remedies on top of state law. Each row shows its own verified date, and each state links to its own page with what every figure does, every precondition, and full citations.

Every state imposes a habitability duty on residential landlords — in 32 states it comes from statute alone, in 12 from a statute plus a court-recognized implied warranty, in 4 from court decisions alone, and in 2 the answer depends on where in the state the home sits.

* Conditions apply — see the state's page for the full rule and citations.

Figures are the statutory periods exactly as each statute states them, and they do not measure the same thing: in some states the count is a deadline to complete the repair, in others a window to begin work, a rebuttable presumption of a reasonable time, or a whichever-comes-sooner rule — and many states state no number at all. A blank day count does not mean no duty. Two states answer differently in different parts of the state, marked with an asterisk. The linked state page carries what each figure does, every precondition, and full citations. Several cities add their own standards and remedies on top of state law; those local pages are linked from their state's row.

No figure appears here unless it was verified against official state sources on the date shown — see how we verify.

City habitability laws

Some cities give tenants and landlords materially different answers than state law — to what must be fixed, how fast, what the tenant can lawfully do, or what the tenant gets. These pages carry each city's verified answers with full citations. A city appears here only when its law changes at least one of those four answers; administrative programs a city runs for itself — rental registration, licensing, routine inspection schedules, and their fees — are duties owed to the city, not changes to those answers, and do not get pages.

• Los Angeles, California — Los Angeles cuts the rent and lets tenants pay it into a city escrow account when a landlord misses the deadline on a housing violation order.
• San Francisco, California — San Francisco lets a tenant in a rent-controlled unit petition the Rent Board for a reduction of base rent where the landlord has substantially decreased a housing service without a corresponding reduction in rent.
• Chicago, Illinois — In Chicago a landlord must keep the home in compliance with every applicable provision of the municipal code and promptly make the repairs that duty requires, and the ordinance backs that with repair-and-deduct, rent withholding and termination rights that reach well beyond what Illinois statutes provide.
• Albuquerque, New Mexico — Albuquerque enforces habitability through the city rather than through new tenant remedies: a landlord has 72 hours to abate a habitability violation, faces an automatic $500 fine on a third violation within 12 months, and must pay a resident's relocation costs when the repair will take more than seven days.
• New York City, New York — New York City writes its own habitability standards into the Housing Maintenance Code, which fixes minimum indoor temperatures across a heat season running October 1 through May 31, puts square-foot thresholds on mold and names the pests that count, carries the city's lead paint duties, and is enforced by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development rather than through the state warranty.