Where Cities Can Set Rent Limits: The 50-State Rent Control Preemption Map (2026)

Landlord Atlas research. Published: August 15, 2026. Data as verified: October 2, 2026. Download the 50-state table as CSV; the full records are in the Landlord Atlas dataset.

Summary

Whether a city or county can limit rent increases is decided first by state law. We read the controlling statute of every state and recorded one of three postures: the state bars local rent regulation, the state does not bar it (local regulation is permitted, expressly authorized, or available through a statutory pathway), or no statute addresses the question either way. We do not infer a ban from silence.

• 31 states bar local rent control by statute. Most of these statutes carve out housing the local government itself owns or subsidizes, and several also allow voluntary incentive agreements; three (Indiana, Mississippi, and Utah) allow local rent control only if the legislature first approves it, which we count as barred.
• 9 states do not bar it: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, and Texas. Local rent regulation is in force today in 7 of them (California, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York). Minnesota's pathway requires voter approval at a general election; Texas allows a city rent control ordinance only in a governor-approved disaster emergency; Hawaii merely preserves county emergency ordinances that no county has adopted. The District of Columbia is outside this 50-state map — it has no state above it — and regulates rents under its own law; its record is listed with the local regimes below.
• 10 states have no express statute either way: Alaska, Delaware, Louisiana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. None has a statewide rent cap, and none of their records documents a local rent-regulation ordinance in force; the closest attempt, Providence, Rhode Island's April 2026 ordinance, was vetoed.
• Only 3 states cap rent increases statewide (California, Oregon, and Washington), and 2 of the three (Oregon and Washington) also bar cities from adding local limits. A statewide cap is more often paired with preemption than with local control; California is the state where both operate at once. New York's statewide statute is different in kind: an opt-in framework under which municipalities adopt rent stabilization, not a statewide cap.
• The line is moving toward preemption. Preemption statutes were newly enacted, extended, or amended in 2025 in Arkansas (Act 459, effective August 5, 2025; the statute now reaches rent, application fees, and deposits), Missouri (effective August 28, 2025), Nebraska (LB 266), and Idaho (recodified July 1, 2025); Florida repealed its referendum-based emergency pathway in 2023 and Ohio enacted its ban in 2022. Washington capped rents statewide in May 2025 while keeping its local ban in place. Movement the other way is local and specific: Connecticut extended its fair rent commission mandate to every municipality of 15,000 or more on January 1, 2026, and New York City's Rent Guidelines Board froze stabilized rents for leases beginning October 2026.

The map

Each tile links to the state's rent-increase page, where the posture is stated with its citation. Postures with a qualifier (a legislative-approval, voter-approval, or emergency pathway; a statewide cap; a savings clause) are marked with a dot; the table below spells each one out.

What "barred" and "not barred" mean in practice

Barred. The typical statute forbids every unit of local government from adopting an ordinance that controls the amount of rent charged for private residential (often also commercial) property. Home-rule status does not help: Illinois names home-rule cities such as Chicago expressly, Missouri's ban reaches charter jurisdictions, and New Mexico's reaches home-rule municipalities. Most bans leave local governments free to set rents on housing they own or subsidize, and several (Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Wisconsin, Colorado) allow voluntary agreements in which an owner accepts rent limits in exchange for an incentive. Colorado has since 2021 also allowed inclusionary land-use rules that restrict rents on newly built units when the developer is offered alternatives. Massachusetts permits only an opt-in scheme in which owner compliance is voluntary and the municipality must compensate owners, a pathway no municipality uses. Virginia has no rent-control ban by name, but its Residential Landlord and Tenant Act supersedes all local landlord-tenant ordinances and no statute grants localities rent authority, so the effect is the same.

Not barred. New York expressly authorizes any city, town, or village to opt into rent stabilization by declaring a housing emergency at a vacancy rate of five percent or less; New Jersey's more than one hundred local rent-control ordinances rest on general municipal police powers, with a state-law exemption for newly constructed multiple dwellings; Maine's municipalities act under home-rule ordinance power; Maryland's counties and Takoma Park act under home-rule powers; California cities may regulate rents but the Costa-Hawkins Act exempts newer buildings and single-family homes and allows rent to reset between tenancies; Connecticut goes further and now requires municipalities of 15,000 or more to create or join a fair rent commission. Minnesota's statute generally prohibits local rent control but allows it when voters approve the measure at a general election, which is how St. Paul's ordinance operates. Texas and Hawaii are not barred on paper but have no local rent regulation in force: Texas permits a city ordinance only in a governor-approved disaster emergency, and Hawaii's statute merely preserves county emergency ordinances that none has adopted.

No express statute. In ten states no statute authorizes or prohibits local rent regulation. Whether a municipality could act turns on the general limits of municipal power under that state's law, a question we do not attempt to answer for it. We record the absence as an absence. Published lists of "states that preempt rent control" vary in their counts largely because they treat this group differently; ours reports it separately.

Local rent limits in force, with current figures

The Landlord Atlas locality layer records local rent-regulation regimes in the states whose posture permits them, each with its own citations and verification date and each time-limited figure stated with the period it applies to and the official source that published it. It is a stated selection of major rent-regulated markets, not exhaustive coverage of every municipality; New Jersey and California in particular have far more local ordinances than the ten and eighteen recorded here. Six entries record verified absences: two in Rhode Island, plus Chicago (barred by Illinois' preemption statute), Minneapolis (authorized by voters in 2021, no ordinance enacted), Boston (barred by Massachusetts' 1994 statute; a 2023 home rule petition was never granted), and Seattle (barred by Washington's statute; the statewide cap applies).

The 50-state table

One row per state: the posture, what the statute provides in plain language, the controlling citation with a link to the official text, and the date the posture was verified against that text. Sorted alphabetically; the same rows are in the CSV download.

Method and limits

1. The unit of analysis is the state statute. For each state we identified whether any statute expressly bars local governments from regulating the amount of rent charged for private residential property, or expressly authorizes or preserves such regulation, and read the controlling text on the state legislature's official site. The citation and the verification date appear on every row.
2. Postures are assigned from statutory text, not from practice or commentary. A state whose statute bars local rent control unless the legislature approves is recorded as barred, with the qualifier stated; a state whose statute permits local rent control only through a voter-approval or emergency pathway is recorded as not barred, with the qualifier stated, because the pathway exists in law. Silence is recorded as silence.
3. Case law and attorney-general opinions are outside this analysis's scope except where a record's summary refers to one (New Jersey's ordinances rest on police powers upheld by its Supreme Court). A state we record as having no express statute may still be constrained by general municipal-power doctrine; we make no claim either way.
4. The local-figures table is a stated selection. It reports every locality record in the dataset as of the data date above; it does not represent every rent-regulated municipality in any state.
5. Any change to a posture after publication is recorded in the dataset's changelog, and this page's tables and counts are generated from the current records, so the data date above moves when they do. Our methodology page describes how records are verified and how corrections are handled.