If you have just moved to San Francisco for a job or to start something, the most consequential fact about your apartment is not the rent, the square footage or the commute. It is whether the building was completed on or before 13 June 1979. That date decides whether your rent can rise by 1.6 percent a year or by whatever the landlord decides, and it appears nowhere on your lease.
This guide covers what actually governs a San Francisco tenancy, with every figure traced to the ordinance, the statute or the city rate schedule it comes from.
13 June 1979
The San Francisco Rent Ordinance covers residential units in buildings constructed on or before 13 June 1979. If the certificate of occupancy was issued after that date, the unit is exempt from rent control. This is the largest exemption in the city by a wide margin.
Consider what that means in practice. The new towers in SoMa, Mission Bay, Dogpatch and Rincon Hill, the buildings with the gym and the roof deck and the package room, are almost all post 1979 and therefore uncapped. The unrenovated Victorian flat in the Mission or the Richmond, with the radiator that clanks and the landlord who has owned it since the eighties, is almost certainly covered and capped.
People arriving on a strong salary tend to choose the former, because it is easier to tour, easier to apply for and looks like what an apartment is supposed to look like. They are choosing, without being told, a unit where the rent can move by any amount at renewal.
Find out which side of the line your building sits on before you sign, not after. It is a matter of public record.
What the cap actually is
For covered units, the allowable annual increase is 1.6 percent for the period from 1 March 2026 to 28 February 2027. The figure is set at 60 percent of the Bay Area Consumer Price Index, which is why it changes every year and why it is usually a small number.
It applies to base rent only and does not include passthroughs, which are separate charges a landlord may petition for. A landlord must give 30 days written notice before an increase takes effect.
On four thousand dollars a month, 1.6 percent is sixty four dollars. In an uncapped building the same renewal can arrive at any number the market supports, and in this city the market has supported some remarkable numbers.
The exemption most people misread
Single family homes and condominiums are a special case, and this is where newcomers get caught.
If you moved into a single family home or a condominium on or after 1 January 1996, the unit is generally exempt from rent control regardless of when it was built. So the charming house in Bernal Heights from 1920 may have no rent cap at all.
Two exceptions bring full rent control back. If the previous tenant was removed through a no fault eviction, or if the property had uncorrected housing code violations for at least six months before the vacancy, the unit remains covered.
And here is the part that matters most, because almost nobody knows it. Even where rent control does not apply, just cause eviction protection usually does.
Seventeen reasons, and only seven are your fault
Section 37.9 of the Rent Ordinance sets out seventeen just cause grounds for eviction. A landlord in a covered unit cannot simply decline to renew. They must have one of these.
Grounds one through seven are fault based: nonpayment or habitual late payment, breach of the rental agreement after written notice, nuisance or substantial interference with other residents, illegal use of the unit, refusing to sign a lease extension on materially identical terms, denying lawful access after written notice, and an unapproved subtenant remaining as the sole occupant.
Grounds eight through seventeen are no fault: landlord move in, condominium conversion, demolition, capital improvements, substantial rehabilitation, Ellis Act withdrawal, lead abatement, and several categories of development related demolition.
Most of the no fault grounds require the landlord to make relocation payments. No fault evictions cannot be carried out during an active lease term, which is a straightforward argument for a fixed term lease over a month to month arrangement if you intend to stay.
Ground seven deserves a second look if you travel. An unapproved subtenant remaining as the sole occupant is a fault based ground for eviction. Listing your room while you are away raising money, without the landlord's approval, puts your tenancy inside that paragraph.
The deposit, and the exception that lets them ask for two months
California caps a residential security deposit at one month of rent, whether the unit is furnished or unfurnished. That was not always the case and it catches out anyone working from older guidance.
There is a narrow exception permitting two months, and all of its conditions must hold at once. The landlord must be a natural person, or a limited liability company in which every member is a natural person. They must own no more than two residential rental properties. Those properties must contain no more than four dwelling units in total.
Read that carefully, because a great deal of San Francisco housing is owned exactly that way. A couple who own a two unit building and live in one half qualify. A corporation does not, whatever its size, and neither does an LLC with a single corporate member. The higher deposit also may not be demanded from a servicemember.
The deposit must be returned within twenty one days of the end of the tenancy.
Your landlord owes you 4.2 percent, and there is a cliff
This is the part that almost nobody claims.
San Francisco requires landlords to pay interest on security deposits. For the period from 1 March 2026 to 28 February 2027 the rate is 4.2 percent. On a four thousand dollar deposit that is one hundred and sixty eight dollars a year.
Interest is payable annually, on the anniversary of the day the landlord received the deposit, and the landlord may either pay it directly or credit it against your rent.
Now the condition that matters for this audience specifically. The deposit must be held for more than one year before interest accrues. If you vacate before completing a full year of occupancy, no interest is due at all.
Tech tenure in a single apartment is frequently shorter than a year. Someone who leaves at eleven months gets nothing. Someone who leaves at thirteen months is owed a full year of interest at 4.2 percent and, in most cases, will never be paid it because they did not know to ask. Ask at the anniversary, in writing, and keep the reply.
Three days does not mean three days
If rent is late, California allows a three day notice to pay or quit. The counting is not what it looks like.
The three days exclude Saturdays, Sundays and judicial holidays. A notice served on the Thursday before a holiday weekend does not expire on the Sunday. Treating those as plain calendar days is the single most common error in published guidance on California notice periods, and it produces a defective notice rather than a fast eviction.
Knowing this is worth more to a tenant than to a landlord, because a defective notice does not shorten the process. It restarts it.
Running a company from your apartment
If you are building something, three practical points sit at the intersection of your lease and your company.
Many San Francisco leases contain clauses restricting commercial use of the premises. Whether any given clause is enforceable against a person writing code on a laptop is a question for a lawyer rather than for a blog, but you should know what your lease says before you put your apartment on a filing.
Which leads to the second point. Entity filings with the Secretary of State are public records. Registering your company at your apartment address publishes where you live, permanently and in a searchable database. A registered agent or a commercial address costs very little and is the version you will wish you had chosen once the company has any profile at all.
Third, if you are living in a founder house, the lease and the arrangement between you are two different documents. The lease governs your relationship with the landlord. What happens when one of four people leaves in month seven, who is liable for their share, and how the deposit is divided are matters for a written agreement between the occupants. Doing it verbally works right up until it does not.
Disclosure: the two links below are affiliate links. If you use them we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. They do not influence what we publish, and nothing on this page is legal advice.
LegalZoom handles entity formation and registered agent service, which covers the second point above. LawDepot has roommate and co-tenancy agreements, which covers the third. For anything turning on your specific lease, an attorney licensed in California is the correct answer rather than a template.
What we are not telling you
We are not going to hand you a neighborhood rent figure.
Our San Francisco rent dataset is built from the Zillow Observed Rent Index at city level, which is a typical observed market rent for the city as a whole. It is not a median lease, not a bedroom specific quote, not a neighborhood figure, and not the rent being paid by tenants already in place. Those limitations are recorded in the file rather than buried, and quoting a city index as though it were a neighborhood price is how most rent journalism goes wrong.
Everything above comes from the ordinance, the statute or the published city rate schedule, which is why we are willing to state it plainly.
Before you sign
Establish whether the building was completed on or before 13 June 1979, and whether the unit is a single family home or condominium you are moving into after 1 January 1996.
Ask whether the landlord is a natural person or an entity, because it determines whether one month or two is lawful.
Diarise the anniversary of the day you hand over the deposit. That is your deposit interest date, and it is worth 4.2 percent once you pass a full year.
Prefer a fixed term lease over month to month if you mean to stay, because no fault grounds cannot be exercised during an active term.
And do not sublet your room without written approval, however short the trip.
The data behind this article
The San Francisco edition publishes nine datasets covering rent trends, renter cost burden, eviction notices and grounds, housing production, the development pipeline and transit service. Each records its source URL, its retrieval date and a checksum of the file it was built from, so anyone can reproduce it.
San Francisco datasets. The cross city statutory comparison setting California against Massachusetts, Georgia, Illinois, Florida and New York is available as CSV or JSON, and the moving guides cover what changes when you move between them.
Verified 21 September 2026. Homzora is a housing research and data publisher. It is not a licensed real estate brokerage, property manager, lender or law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. Rates set by the San Francisco Rent Board change annually. For a specific tenancy, consult an attorney licensed in California.