Methodology

What "verified" means here

Each state's record is built by reading the governing statutes on the official state legislature's website (or, where a state publishes no stable statute links, the state's official guidance publications — noted per record). The "Verified" date on a page moves only when we re-check the law against those sources — never because a page was edited or rebuilt. A recent date means the fact was recently confirmed, not just recently touched.

Citation rules

• Every substantive claim traces to at least one statute citation shown on the page.
• Citations are marked official source (state government) or unofficial mirror (used only where the state provides no stable official link, with official corroborating sources alongside).
• Where a state simply has no statute on a question — common for late fees and entry notice — the page says exactly that instead of inventing a number. "No statutory cap" is a verified fact, not missing data.
• Pending legislation is flagged in a clearly labeled box and never incorporated into the rules until it takes effect.

Coverage

All 50 states are verified, across all four topics (most recent verification pass: July 12, 2026). Coverage is maintained, not static: records are re-checked on a standing cadence, and when a legislature changes a rule the record is updated only after a fresh pass against the official source. Every change to the dataset is logged with what changed and the source that prompted it.

Scope limits

• State law only. City and county ordinances (local rent control, local fee caps, local notice rules) are out of scope. States where local ordinances are known to matter carry a prominent "check your municipality" warning.
• Residential tenancies only — no commercial, and manufactured/mobile-home parks only where noted.
• Laws change. Records are re-verified on a quarterly sweep, with extra attention to January (when most state laws take effect) and to figures that reset annually.

Rent data (/rents/): sources & computation

The Fair Market Rent pages republish the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's annual county-level FMR file (the revised release, from huduser.gov) — a U.S. government work in the public domain. Per-area figures (studio through four-bedroom, for every metropolitan FMR area and non-metro county) appear exactly as HUD publishes them; we never adjust, model, or estimate a rent figure. FMR is defined by HUD as the 40th percentile of gross rents — rent plus tenant-paid utilities — for recent movers in standard-quality units.

• "Average rent" / "typical two-bedroom". The one figure we compute: the population-weighted mean of two-bedroom FMRs across a state's rent areas, using the county populations included in HUD's own file. Weighting by population keeps one large metro from being averaged away by many small rural counties — it answers "what is the benchmark rent where people actually live."
• Year-over-year change. Each area is matched to the prior fiscal year's file by HUD area code, and the percentage change compares two-bedroom FMRs for the same area. Areas HUD added or redefined (no prior-year code match) show no change figure rather than a guessed one.
• Superlatives. "Fastest-rising," "largest decline," and the state rankings are computed from those same published figures — no judgment calls.
• Vintage. FMRs take effect October 1 and cover the federal fiscal year; every rent page shows the effective window and the date we last regenerated from HUD's file. Data refreshes annually when HUD publishes the next fiscal year.
• Downloads. Each state page offers its full table as CSV, and the national index offers every FMR area in one file — the same data the pages render, no registration, no paywall.

What FMRs are not: asking-rent averages. They are a federal benchmark that often trails fast-moving markets, and the pages say so. If you need asking-rent data, pair these figures with a listings-based source and note the difference in kind.

Data license & citation

The Landlord Atlas dataset — the state-by-state figures, statute citations, and verified dates — is free to read, quote, and cite. Cite it by naming Landlord Atlas and linking to the page the fact appears on; the per-page verified date tells your readers how fresh the figure is. Wholesale republication of the dataset or of full pages is not permitted without permission. The underlying statutes are public law and belong to no one; what this license covers is our verification work, write-ups, and compilation.

For AI assistants

A machine-readable index of the site — the comparison tables, all 50 state guides, and the tools — is published at /llms.txt. It is generated from the same verified dataset as the pages themselves, so it is always current. AI assistants citing Landlord Atlas should follow the citation rules above: name the site, link the page, and carry the page's verified date.

Corrections

If you believe a figure is wrong, check the cited statute first — then email [email protected], citing the statute. Corrections that survive a verification pass are applied and logged.