North Carolina Landlord-Tenant Laws
Local rent regulation in North Carolina
North Carolina law prohibits counties and cities from regulating the rent charged for privately owned residential or commercial rental property, with exceptions for government-owned housing, subsidized-rental agreements, CDBG-assisted properties, and properties receiving local funding or incentives.
Cited to N.C.G.S. § 42-14.1 · Verified August 12, 2026 · Full North Carolina rent-increase rules →
North Carolina Security deposits
North Carolina caps security deposits at two months' rent for leases longer than month-to-month (one and a half months for month-to-month, two weeks for week-to-week), and the landlord must return the deposit with a written itemization within 30 days of the tenancy ending and the unit being surrendered.
North Carolina Rent increase notice
North Carolina has no statute directly regulating rent increases or requiring rent-increase notice; the practical floor is G.S. 42-14's termination notice, which for a month-to-month tenancy is just seven days — among the shortest in the country — so a landlord can effectively impose a new rent on seven days' notice by making it the price of continuing the tenancy.
North Carolina Late fees
North Carolina caps residential late fees at the greater of $15 or 5% of the monthly rent (for weekly rentals, the greater of $4 or 5% of weekly rent), and no fee may be charged unless the payment is five or more days late — a statutory grace period.
North Carolina Entry notice
North Carolina has no statute requiring any particular advance notice before a landlord enters a rental unit — no fixed hours and no codified 'reasonable notice' standard.
North Carolina Eviction process
North Carolina's eviction — 'summary ejectment' — starts, for nonpayment, with a demand for all past-due rent and a 10-day wait, but that famous 10-day rule is only a default: it is an implied forfeiture that applies when the lease has no forfeiture clause of its own, the demand does not have to be in writing, and a lease can shorten or waive it.
North Carolina mobile home park laws
North Carolina has no manufactured home community tenancy act, so lot tenancies run on the general landlord-tenant law in Chapter 42 of the General Statutes, which carries three rules written specifically for manufactured homes: sixty days' notice to end a tenancy that is only the rental of a space for a manufactured home, 180 days' notice before a community of five or more homes is converted to another use, and twenty-one days after an eviction in which the community owner must release the home to its owner.
Lot-rent, closure, park-sale and home-sale rules with statute citations →
North Carolina Fair Market Rents (FY 2026) — HUD's benchmark rents for every North Carolina metro area and county.
How this record was verified: Direct read of statute text on the official North Carolina General Assembly site (ncleg.gov / ncleg.net): Tenant Security Deposit Act Article 6 (G.S. 42-50 through 42-56) full article text, G.S. 42-46 (full current text including the SL 2025-52 rewrite of subsection (i)), G.S. 42-14, and G.S. 42-14.1 (operative sentence confirmed in the official Article 1 text). H990 (2025) status verified via LegiScan against the ncleg bill record.