Albuquerque, New Mexico: habitability & repair laws

The ordinance has been in force since July 8, 2026. It creates no repair-and-deduct right, no rent withholding and no termination right — a tenant's own remedies still come from state law, unchanged. What it changes is what must be fixed, how fast, and what a displaced resident gets. Albuquerque's housing code also requires every dwelling unit to have permanently attached cooling facilities, which New Mexico law does not, alongside a heating requirement written as equipment capable of maintaining 68 degrees Fahrenheit three feet above the floor. Two limits matter more than anything else here: the tenant must notify the landlord before reporting the condition to the city, and mold and pest complaints are not habitability violations under this ordinance at all.

Albuquerque habitability law at a glance

Where the law's text lives today

The ordinance has been in force since July 8, 2026. The City Council passed it on June 1, 2026 and it was enacted on June 23, 2026 as Ordinance O-2026-019, council file O-26-24, adding Article 28 to Chapter 14 of the Revised Ordinances of Albuquerque. The city's published code compilation does not yet print Article 28 — Chapter 14 still ends at Article 27, the PATCH program article — so this page cites the enacted ordinance text as the Council passed it. When the compilation catches up, the same provisions will appear there as §§ 14-28-1 through 14-28-10 and the citations on this page will point to them instead. The housing-code standards the ordinance enforces are a different matter: those are already in the published compilation at §§ 14-3-2-1 through 14-3-3-3, and are cited there.

What must be fixed

Albuquerque requires something New Mexico law does not: every dwelling unit must be provided with cooling facilities. The city's housing code says what counts. Acceptable cooling facilities are fixtures permanently attached to the unit, including evaporative or swamp coolers, central air conditioning, heat pumps, radiant cooling, window units and mini-splits. Fans, ceiling fans, mobile evaporative coolers, portable air conditioners and ventilation systems are not acceptable as a unit's sole source of cooling; they may serve as the sole source only on a temporary basis while the permanent cooling facility is being repaired or replaced. The cooling requirement has been in force since July 1, 2025. There is no numeric cooling performance standard and no defined cooling season in Albuquerque — the duty is to provide and maintain the equipment, not to hold the unit at a stated temperature. The heating standard sits in the same subsection and is stated with the heat rule. The enforcement ordinance adds no standards of its own. It works off a closed list of six existing housing-code sections — room dimensions, light and ventilation, sanitation, structural requirements, mechanical requirements, and exits — and it reaches a violation of one of them only where the violation endangers life, limb, health, property, safety or public welfare of the occupants. Nothing outside those six sections is a habitability violation for this ordinance's purposes, which is why mold and pests sit outside it.

The local heat standard

The duty is framed as equipment rather than as delivered temperature. Every dwelling unit and guest room must be provided with heating facilities capable of maintaining a room temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit at a point three feet above the floor in all habitable rooms, installed and maintained in a safe condition under the mechanical code the city has adopted. There is no heating season, no day-and-night split and no outdoor-temperature trigger: the standard reads the same all year, and what it requires is equipment able to reach the figure, not a promise that the figure will be held at particular hours. Three collateral limits travel with it. Unvented fuel-burning heaters are not permitted. Ovens, stoves, ranges and other cooking appliances may not be used to heat any portion of a dwelling. And approved portable space heaters may be the sole source of heat only on a temporary basis, while the permanent heating system is being repaired or replaced. Albuquerque also requires cooling equipment, stated with the rest of the local standards.

How fast

The first tier runs on 72 hours. On receipt of a habitability violation the responsible party — the owner, the owner's designee, or a manager or agent — has 72 hours to abate the condition, and the same 72 hours runs from receipt of notice from the city. An unabated violation is issued daily unless an extension is granted. The second tier is triggered by repetition: three habitability violations at a rental property within a 12-month period bring an automatic $500 fine on the third violation and on every violation after it, for 12 months measured from the most recent violation, with the 72-hour abatement clock still running on each. A condition that needs longer than 72 hours does not simply get more time. The responsible party must provide a written plan for achieving compliance — a reasonable timeline, a description of the necessary improvements, active building permit numbers, milestones for completion and the anticipated occupancy date — and the Planning Department approves that plan at its discretion. Without an approved plan, or where the extended timeline is missed, the penalty is $500 plus $500 for every day until the condition is remediated. Two administrative clocks sit alongside those. A notice of violation served by certified mail takes effect on the earlier of the date it is received or seven days after the first attempted delivery, and a fine must be paid in full within 30 days of the date of the order. Relocation runs on its own seven-day count, stated with what a displaced resident gets.

What the tenant gets

Where remediating a habitability violation will take more than seven days, the responsible party must pay the residents' relocation costs, payable within seven days of receipt of the violation. The duty attaches where the condition was within the owner's control and the owner knew or should have known of it, and notice from the enforcing agency counts as proof of that knowledge. If the responsible party fails to relocate the tenant within seven days, the city administers the relocation itself, and the responsible party then owes the full cost to the city within 30 days of the original receipt of the violation. Unpaid, that cost becomes a lien: placed first on the subject property, and only afterwards on any other asset owned by the property's owner, with the city able to pursue remedies including foreclosure. Two limits on what this is worth to a resident. The ordinance sets no dollar ceiling on relocation costs and states no formula for calculating them, and the city has not published a procedure for claiming them, so the amount is worked out case by case. And the fines are payable to the city, not to the tenant — the ordinance directs that revenue into a segregated account to be used only for enforcement and tenant assistance.

Who enforces it and how

The Planning Department's Code Enforcement Division enforces the ordinance, and enforcement is complaint-driven. The occupant of the rental property must give notice to the responsible party before notifying the Planning Department — that is a condition the ordinance writes into the process, not advice. Intake after that is the city's general 311 channel; there is no habitability-specific portal, form or phone line. A condition amounting to an imminent hazard leaves this track entirely and goes to the city's emergency abatement process, where an inspector may order immediate abatement without notice and may declare a structure unfit for human occupancy and order it vacated, with reinspection for re-occupancy within three business days of a written request. A notice of violation must carry nine stated elements, including a statement that a hardship or low-income waiver is available and a statement that an unpaid fine becomes a lien. Civil fines are appealable to the city's Independent Office of Hearings. The Planning Department must report to the Council each January on the violations issued under each tier, the revenue collected and where the violations occurred, which makes January 2027 the first published picture of how the ordinance is actually working.

What housing is covered

The ordinance applies to residential rental units within the city limits, with three exclusions written into it: units that are only owner-occupied, short-term rentals, and hotels or other transient lodging units. The housing-code standards it enforces reach further than the ordinance does — the heating and cooling requirements are written for every dwelling unit and guest room, and they are enforced under the housing code whether or not a particular unit falls inside this ordinance.

How this fits with New Mexico law

New Mexico's statute requires the owner to put and keep the premises in a safe condition rather than setting a fit-and-habitable standard, and the state's courts have never recognized a common-law warranty of habitability, so a tenant's statewide route to relief is the written-notice-plus-seven-days rent abatement or termination under the state Act. Albuquerque layers city enforcement on top of that — a 72-hour abatement clock, escalating fines, and a landlord duty to pay a displaced resident's relocation costs — without creating any new remedy a tenant can exercise directly against the landlord.

Notes and caveats

• Mold and pests are not habitability violations under this ordinance — Nearly every summary of the Albuquerque ordinance gets this wrong. A habitability violation is defined by a closed list of six housing-code sections — room dimensions, light and ventilation, sanitation, structural requirements, mechanical requirements, and exits — and none of them addresses mold or pests. So a mold or pest complaint does not start the 72-hour clock, does not count toward the three-violations-in-12-months trigger for the automatic $500 fine, and does not bring the relocation duty into play. Those complaints land instead under the housing code's separate substandard-buildings provisions, where inadequate sanitation covers a list of its own and a nuisance or an unsafe condition is handled through ordinary code enforcement, with an imminent hazard going to emergency abatement. Water intrusion has a partial route back in: the structural section requires every building to be weather protected so as to provide shelter against the elements and to exclude dampness, and that section is one of the six.
• Notify the landlord before the city — the city publishes it both ways — The ordinance requires the occupant of a rental property to give notice to the responsible party before notifying the Planning Department of a habitability violation. It is a precondition, and it was added on the Council floor for exactly that purpose. The city's own material is not consistent about it. The mayoral announcement of the signing states it correctly, telling residents to notify the landlord, property manager or other responsible party first and to keep documentation of the request, then to contact 311 if the condition is not resolved. The Planning Department's chronic-offenders page tells tenants to report lack of heat or air conditioning, plumbing leaks, mold, pest infestations, exposed wiring and major structural defects to 311, with no mention of the landlord-first step. Where the two disagree, the ordinance governs.
• The abatement period is 72 hours, not 48 — A 48-hour figure circulates and it has a traceable source: the explanatory paragraph attached to the floor amendment that set the period says the amendment changed it from 24 to 48 hours, while the operative text of that same amendment says 72 — and 72 is what the enacted ordinance says, in both the tier provision and the extension provision. The explanatory paragraph has no operative effect. The period is 72 hours.
• No numeric cooling performance standard exists in Albuquerque — The city requires cooling facilities, permanently attached and of a listed type. It does not say how cold they must keep a unit. A 2026 bill would have added a performance test — as introduced, an indoor temperature at least 15 degrees Fahrenheit below outdoor conditions whenever the outdoor temperature reached 85 degrees, measured about three feet above the floor. That numeric test was stripped on the Council floor and replaced with a cooling season and a general measurable-reduction standard, and the weakened bill was then vetoed and the veto sustained in May 2026. None of it is law. Anyone citing an 85-degree trigger, a 15-degree differential, or a May-through-September cooling season as an Albuquerque requirement is citing a bill that failed.
• The ordinance is in force, but the administrative apparatus is not published yet — As of late August 2026, roughly seven weeks after the effective date, the city had not published rules implementing the ordinance, a complaint form or dedicated intake route for habitability violations, a template or submission route for the written remediation plan that an extension requires, a relocation-cost claim procedure, or a fee-schedule entry. The general 311 channel is the advertised way to report a housing-code problem, and the Planning Department's code-enforcement pages do not mention the ordinance. What that means in practice: a landlord served with a violation should expect the clock, the tiers and the relocation duty to be applied from the ordinance text itself, and should expect the written remediation plan to be submitted to the Planning Department without a published form. The first scheduled public account of the program is the report the Planning Department owes the Council in January 2027.
• Why this page states no local tenant remedy — The ordinance is enforcement-shaped. It gives the city a clock, fines, a lien and a relocation duty it can administer; it gives the tenant no repair-and-deduct right, no rent withholding, no escrow, no termination right and no private claim against the landlord. The one thing it requires of a tenant is the notice to the landlord that has to come before a report to the city. A tenant's own remedies in Albuquerque are the state ones — the rent abatement and the termination route under the New Mexico statute — and they are unchanged by this ordinance.
• The ordinance goes by more than one name — Its short-title provision names it the Rental Habitability Enforcement Ordinance, while the bill caption and the city's own announcements call it the Rental Unit Habitability Enforcement Ordinance, and two provisions inside it use a third form, the Rental Unit Habitability Ordinance. They are the same instrument: Ordinance O-2026-019, council file O-26-24.
• The companion resolution changes city priorities, not landlord duties — A resolution passed the same night directs Code Enforcement to prioritize complaints about space and occupancy standards, general requirements and substandard buildings, and complaints containing the words heating, cooling or air conditioning, running or hot water, blocked exit, or ventilation, ahead of violation types not related to public health and safety. An earlier resolution directed staffing, training and complaint-handling improvements. Both are internal city administration: neither creates, alters or removes a duty owed by a landlord or a right held by a tenant, and neither should be cited as substantive law. One consequence is worth knowing, though — the priority list reaches the substandard-buildings provisions, which the enforcement ordinance itself does not.

Cite this page: "Landlord Atlas, Albuquerque, New Mexico: habitability & repair laws (verified August 30, 2026), landlordatlas.com/laws/habitability/new-mexico/albuquerque/" — free to cite and quote with a link (how these records are verified).

Citations

• Rental Habitability Enforcement Ordinance, ROA 1994 ch. 14 art. 28, §§ 14-28-1 to 14-28-10 (Ordinance O-2026-019, council file O-26-24), enacted text · §§ 14-28-3 to 14-28-10; SECTIONS 2, 3, 6 (verified 2026) Official source
• City of Albuquerque legislation record for council file O-26-24 (enactment number, effective date, action history and roll calls) (verified 2026) Official source
• Floor amendments to council bill O-26-24 posted for the June 1, 2026 Council meeting (72-hour abatement period; occupant-notice obligation; lien ordering; certified-mail service) · Amendments No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 1 to No. 4 (verified 2026) Official source
• Office of the City Clerk, signed Ordinance O-2026-019 (verified 2026) Official source
• ROA 1994 § 14-3-3-2 (Uniform Housing Code, mechanical requirements: heating and cooling) · (A)(1)(a), (A)(1)(b), (A)(1)(c) (verified 2026) Official source
• ROA 1994 ch. 14 art. 3 (Uniform Housing Code: space and occupancy standards, general requirements, substandard buildings) · §§ 14-3-2-1 to 14-3-3-3 (verified 2026) Official source
• ROA 1994 § 14-3-4-1 (substandard building; emergency abatement and unfit-for-occupancy orders) · (A), (B) (verified 2026) Official source
• ROA 1994 § 14-3-4-2 (inadequate sanitation) · (A)-(N) (verified 2026) Official source
• ROA 1994 ch. 14, table of articles in the city's published code compilation (Chapter 14 ends at Article 27) (verified 2026) Official source
• City of Albuquerque, mayoral announcement of the signing of the rental habitability ordinance (city guidance: notify the landlord first, then contact 311) (verified 2026) Official source
• City of Albuquerque Planning Department, chronic-offenders initiative page (city guidance telling tenants to report conditions to 311) (verified 2026) Official source
• City of Albuquerque Planning Department, reporting a housing code violation (311 intake) (verified 2026) Official source

How this record was verified: The enacted ordinance for council file O-26-24, taken from the engrossed final text in the City of Albuquerque's own legislative records, together with the introduced bill, the four floor amendments posted by Council Services for the June 1, 2026 Council meeting, and the Council's action history and roll calls for the same file — the introduced and final texts compared clause by clause so that every difference is accounted for by a passed amendment. The Office of the City Clerk's publication notice and signed-ordinance record for enactment O-2026-019. The city's published code compilation for the housing-code standards the ordinance enforces: Chapter 14 Article 3, the Uniform Housing Code, at §§ 14-3-2-1, 14-3-2-2, 14-3-2-3, 14-3-3-1, 14-3-3-2 and 14-3-3-3, and Part 4 on substandard buildings at §§ 14-3-4-1 through 14-3-4-11, along with the Chapter 14 table of articles for the codification statement. The city's own published guidance surfaces on the new ordinance and on how housing complaints are taken: the mayoral announcement of the signing, the Planning Department's code-enforcement and complaint-reporting pages, and the chronic-offenders initiative page.

This page records Albuquerque's local law on habitability and repairs. The statewide position — New Mexico's standard is a safe condition rather than fit and habitable: the owner must substantially comply with the applicable minimum housing codes materially affecting health and safety, put and keep the premises in a safe condition, keep common areas safe, maintain the electrical, plumbing, sanitary, heating, ventilating and air conditioning facilities and appliances in good and safe working order, handle waste receptacles and removal, and supply running water, a reasonable amount of hot water at all times, and reasonable heat. — lives on the New Mexico habitability page with its own citations and verification date.