About RenterLaw
Tenant law is public, but it is spread across statutes, regulations, and government PDFs. It is written for lawyers. It is hardest to read at the moment you need it.
RenterLaw is a free guide to your rights as a renter. Guides are organized by place and by situation. Each answer links to where it comes from, so you can read it yourself instead of taking our word for it.
What is on this site
Guides. One guide per place and situation: repairs, deposits, rent increases, eviction notices, and more. Each guide is written for a specific city, state, or the whole country. See every place we cover.
Legal terms. The words on a lease or a court notice, explained in plain language, with the rule in every place we cover. Browse the terms.
Local help. Some problems need a person, not a page. Where we can, a guide links to the legal aid groups, rent assistance programs, and city offices in that city.
How a guide gets made
Tenant law covers 50 states and thousands of cities. 2 people cannot read and write all of it by hand. So AI does the research and the first draft. We use Claude, made by Anthropic. It finds the law, reads it, and quotes it. It cannot save a quote unless those exact words appear in the source. A made up citation cannot enter the site.
Then a second reader, also AI, checks each statement against its source. It records the exact passage that backs the statement. A statement it cannot confirm is fixed, or held for a person to decide. A person publishes every guide. The line at the top of each guide says who published it and when.
We check every source again each week. If a law changes and the words we quoted are gone, the guide is flagged for review. How a guide is checked.
Who we are
We are 2 people, not a company. Nazanin is the engineer who built the site and runs it. Cameron Monteith is the editor and works with local organizations. More about us.
We are not a law firm, a legal aid organization, a nonprofit, or a government office.
Write to us at contact@renterlaw.org.
What this site is not
This is not legal advice. We can explain what the law says. We cannot tell you what to do in your situation. If your housing is at risk, contact a lawyer or a legal aid office near you.
How the site is paid for
Right now, we pay for it ourselves. We have no ads. We have no affiliate links (links that pay us when you buy something). We do not sell data.
No landlord pays us. No one named in a guide pays us or tells us what to write. If this changes, we will say so on this page.