How much notice is required to raise the rent in North Carolina?

Verified July 8, 2026 All North Carolina topics →

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

H990 (2025-2026 session) — Would rewrite G.S. 42-46 to require landlords to give tenants written notice (hand delivery, mail, or electronic per the lease) before collecting a late fee, stating the amount and date imposed, no earlier than five days after the due date. Caps unchanged.Status: Introduced 2025-04-10; referred to House Rules, Calendar, and Operations 2025-04-14; no further action — not enacted as of the checked date. CAUTION: at least one landlord-facing website reports this notice requirement as effective 2025-10-01; that is wrong (the 2025-10-01 effective date belongs to SL 2025-52's separate amendment of 42-46(i)). (checked 2026-07-08).

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.

Week-to-week tenancies get two days, year-to-year tenancies one month, and manufactured-home lot tenancies a special 60 days. There is no cap on the size or frequency of increases, no statewide rent control, and G.S. 42-14.1 forbids any city or county from regulating rents on privately owned residential or commercial property.

North Carolina 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 increases during or at renewal of a fixed term; the lease controls mid-term, and at expiration the landlord may propose any new rent. A year-to-year tenancy requires one month's notice to quit before the end of the tenancy year (G.S. 42-14).
Statewide rent control / stabilization	No
Rent control details	Not addressed by statute
Local rent control preempted	Yes
Frequency limits	Not addressed by statute

Notes and caveats

notice_days_month_to_month is null per the derivation-state convention (as with TX and GA): 42-14 is a notice-to-quit statute, and the seven-day figure is the derived floor, not a rent-increase statute. Page copy must lead with the seven-day reality since it is dramatically shorter than neighboring states, while flagging the manufactured-home-lot 60-day exception. The 42-14.1 preemption covers residential AND commercial property and has carve-outs for local-government-owned property, subsidized-rental agreements, and CDBG-assisted properties.

Statute citations

G.S. 42-14 Official source
G.S. 42-14.1 Official source

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.