How much notice is required to raise the rent in Arkansas?

Verified July 10, 2026 All Arkansas topics →

Pending legislation — not yet law. The rules on this page reflect current law only. The following bill would change it if enacted:

SB 501 (2025 RS) — 'Tenant Possessions Recovery Act' — Would have required a landlord to give a tenant at least 14 days' written notice before the scheduled repossession date after a court issues a writ of possession, and created a process for tenants to recover personal possessions left behind. Adjacent to, not within, the four v1 topics, but it was the session's principal tenant-side bill.Status: Dead. Filed 2025-03-18, amended and re-referred to Senate Judiciary 2025-03-20, died in committee at the 2025-05-05 sine die adjournment. The 2026 fiscal session was appropriations-only; watch for a refile in the 2027 regular session (Arkansas holds regular sessions in odd years). (checked 2026-07-10).

Arkansas has no statute requiring advance notice of a rent increase, no limit on how large an increase can be, and no limit on how often rent can rise.

The practical floor is the periodic-tenancy termination rule of the statewide Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 2007: either party may end a month-to-month tenancy on 30 days' written notice (week-to-week: 7 days), so a rent increase operates as an offer the tenant can refuse by leaving with 30 days' symmetry — and the Attorney General's guidance tells landlords to give at least one rental period's notice before raising rent. Unlike Arkansas's security-deposit law, this 30-day rule has no small-landlord exemption; it covers every residential rental agreement in the state outside narrow categories like hotels, employee housing, and agricultural leases. Rent control is preempted statewide, and a 2025 law went further than any other state's recent preemption expansions by also barring cities and counties from regulating rental application fees and rental deposit amounts, leaving the state's own two-month deposit cap as the only deposit ceiling.

Arkansas rent increase notice at a glance

Notice — month-to-month	No rent-increase statute — notice derives from tenancy-termination rules (see summary)
Varies by increase size	Not addressed by statute
Fixed-term leases	No statute addresses rent changes for any lease type. Fixed-term rent is locked by contract unless the lease provides otherwise; at renewal the landlord may propose any rent.
Statewide rent control / stabilization	No
Rent control details	No statewide rent control and no cap on increase size or frequency. Local rent control is preempted statewide twice over: A.C.A. 14-16-601 and its municipal twin 14-54-1409 (both from Acts 1993, No. 545) bar any local governmental unit from enacting, maintaining, or enforcing an ordinance controlling rent for private residential or commercial property. Act 459 of 2025 (effective early August 2025) expanded both sections to also preempt local control of RENTAL APPLICATION FEES and RENTAL DEPOSITS ('except as provided under § 18-16-304,' preserving the state's own deposit cap), and declared the preemption applicable to all landlords, property owners, property managers, tenants, prospective tenants, and real estate companies doing business in the state.
Local rent control preempted	Yes
Frequency limits	Not addressed by statute

Notes and caveats

notice_days_month_to_month is null per the TX/GA/NC/TN/KY derivation convention — no rent-increase-notice statute exists; the derivation (18-17-704(b) 30-day m2m termination, statewide) lives in the summary. The derivation is deliberately anchored in ch. 17, NOT ch. 16: the project lead's alternative pointer (18-16-101) is the CRIMINAL failure-to-vacate statute (10 days' written notice after rent default, $1-$25/day misdemeanor fines) — an eviction oddity, not a tenancy-termination or rent-increase rule, and no civil notice-to-quit statute in ch. 16 displaces 18-17-704 for residential tenancies. Ch. 17's scope is the mirror image of the deposit trap and worth stating on-page: 18-17-201 applies the chapter to every 'rental agreement, wherever made, for a dwelling unit located within this state,' with only the 18-17-202 exclusion list (institutional, purchase-contract, fraternal, transient hotel/motel taxed as lodging, employment-conditioned, condo/co-op, agricultural, shelters) — no unit-count exemption. Default tenancy absent a fixed term is month-to-month (week-to-week for roomers paying weekly), 18-17-401(c). Stale-source trap: FindLaw/Justia mirrors of 14-16-601 still show pre-Act-459 text and the old title 'Rent control preemption' — current law (since early August 2025, 91 days after the 2025-05-05 sine die adjournment) is titled 'Rent, rental application fee, and rental deposit control preemption' and the official act PDF is the correct citation for it.

Statute citations

How this record was verified: Arkansas's official code is published via a LexisNexis portal without stable deep links (GA/TN-class sourcing), so verification pairs two independent current-code mirrors with official arkleg.state.ar.us session-law PDFs: every load-bearing section (A.C.A. 18-16-303, 18-16-304, 18-16-305, 18-16-306, 18-17-201, 18-17-202, 18-17-401, 18-17-602, 18-17-704, 18-17-705, 14-16-601) was read verbatim on FindLaw (current through 2024-03-28) and independently re-read on the Justia 2024 Arkansas Code edition (via browser; Justia returned 403 to direct fetches), with all reads matching; chapter 18-17 was additionally read in FULL from a mirrored chapter PDF for negative checks (no late-fee, rent-increase, or entry-notice provision exists). Every amendment was traced to the official act text read from arkleg PDFs: Act 559 of 2009 (deposit return 30->60 days; 18-17-501 rewritten to defer to 18-16-301 et seq.), Act 1052 of 2021 (18-17-502 habitability, context), and Act 459 of 2025 (preemption expanded to application fees and deposits). Corroborated against the Arkansas Attorney General's landlord-tenant page (official state source) and Legal Aid of Arkansas. 2025 regular session swept for landlord-tenant acts (only Act 459 touches an encoded field; SB 501 died in committee 2025-05-05 per the official arkleg bill page); the 2026 fiscal session was appropriations-only.