How Much Must Long Beach Landlords Pay Tenants Under the Relocation Ordinance?

A Long Beach landlord who ends a tenancy for a no-fault reason — owner move-in, pulling a unit off the rental market, or a demolition or substantial remodel — owes the tenant relocation assistance under Long Beach Municipal Code Chapter 8.99, and for demolition or substantial remodel that payment is the greater of $4,500 or two months of the tenant’s rent.

Get the category wrong, skip the required city paperwork, or miss the payment deadline, and the termination notice itself can be ruled void, which leaves you no closer to an empty unit and exposed to penalties on top of it.

Where This Rule Actually Lives in the Municipal Code

Long Beach landlords sometimes go looking for a standalone “Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance” because that is roughly how the city described its first attempt at this in 2019.

The city council passed that original ordinance, codified at the time as LBMC Chapter 8.97, requiring owners of buildings with four or more units to pay up to $4,500 to tenants displaced through no fault of their own.

According to the city’s own District 1 office, that version was short-lived: the council repealed Chapter 8.97 after the statewide Tenant Protection Act (AB 1482) took effect with its own just-cause and relocation requirements, which made the original local ordinance largely redundant.

In its place, the city adopted a broader law: the Just Cause for Termination of Tenancies Ordinance, codified as LBMC Chapter 8.99, which took effect in 2020 and is the version still on the books today.

Chapter 8.99 is where the relocation assistance obligation now lives, folded into a citywide just-cause structure that requires landlords to have a legally recognized reason before ending most residential tenancies.

The City of Long Beach’s Community Development Department points landlords to Chapter 8.99, not to the repealed 8.97, for current compliance, and that is the ordinance this article covers.

One thing Chapter 8.99 does not do is cap how much you can charge in rent. Long Beach has no local rent board and no citywide rent-stabilization ordinance, so the statewide rent cap under Civil Code section 1947.12 (AB 1482) still governs annual increases on most covered units here.

Chapter 8.99 only controls when and why a tenancy can be ended, and what you owe the tenant when you end it for a no-fault reason — the two laws operate side by side.

That history is more than trivia if you are selling.

Title companies, buyer’s agents, and attorneys doing diligence on a Long Beach rental sometimes still ask about “the relocation ordinance” using the older 8.97 name, and you want to be able to point to the correct, currently operative chapter — 8.99 — rather than get pulled into researching a law that was repealed before most of today’s tenancies even started.

If a buyer’s lender or escrow officer asks for proof of compliance, Chapter 8.99 and its implementing forms are what they should be asking about.

Four No-Fault Reasons That Trigger a Payout

Chapter 8.99 splits lease terminations into at-fault causes (nonpayment, lease violations, criminal activity on the premises) and no-fault causes, where the tenant has done nothing wrong but the landlord still has a legally recognized reason to end the tenancy. Relocation assistance is tied specifically to the no-fault category. The no-fault reasons recognized under the ordinance are:

• The owner or a qualifying immediate family member intends to move into the unit.
• The owner intends to permanently withdraw the property from the rental market.
• The owner intends to demolish or substantially remodel the unit.
• The owner is complying with a government order to vacate, typically tied to habitability or safety issues.

Not every renovation qualifies as a “substantial remodel” for purposes of this ordinance.

The work has to be extensive enough that the tenant must vacate for at least 30 consecutive days for it to be done safely — a kitchen refresh or a bathroom reglaze that a tenant could live around does not meet that bar, and using the demolition/remodel category when the work does not actually require a 30-day vacancy is exactly the kind of mismatch that can turn a termination notice into a wrongful-eviction claim.

The City’s Development Services Department has said it can issue a non-binding opinion on whether specific proposed work actually rises to the level of a substantial remodel, which is worth requesting before you commit to that category and the lower relocation payment is not the one that ends up applying.

The Dollar Amounts Long Beach Landlords Owe Right Now

Chapter 8.99 uses a two-tier structure rather than one flat citywide number, and the tier depends entirely on why you are ending the tenancy:

• Demolition or substantial remodel: relocation assistance equal to the greater of $4,500 or two months of the tenant’s rent in effect when the termination notice is served, payable within 15 calendar days of serving that notice.
• Owner/relative move-in, withdrawal from the rental market, or a government order to vacate: relocation assistance equal to one month of the tenant’s rent, which the landlord may satisfy either by paying it directly or by waiving the tenant’s final month of rent in writing instead.

Those figures — $4,500 or two months’ rent for demolition and substantial remodel, one month’s rent for the other three no-fault categories — are what the City of Long Beach’s own Community Development Department and its District 1 office currently list as the active requirement under Chapter 8.99, and independent legal summaries of the ordinance describe the same two-tier structure.

A flat dollar figure like $4,500 is the kind of number a city council can and sometimes does revisit, and nothing in the materials reviewed for this article points to an automatic annual adjustment tied to inflation the way some other cities index their relocation payments.

Still, because council action can change a specific dollar amount faster than a website gets updated, confirm the current figure directly with Long Beach’s Community Development Department or the published municipal code before you serve any notice or calculate what you owe — do not rely on this article, or any other secondhand source, as the final word on the exact number due the day you act.

Run the math before you assume the floor applies. On a unit renting for $2,000 a month, two months’ rent is $4,000 — below the $4,500 floor, so $4,500 is what you’d owe for a demolition or substantial-remodel termination.

On a unit renting for $2,600 a month, two months’ rent is $5,200, which is higher than the floor, so $5,200 is the number that applies instead.

The ordinance uses whichever figure is larger, which means the relocation cost scales up with rent on anything above roughly $2,250 a month — worth knowing before you assume $4,500 is the ceiling.

How Much Notice Tenants Are Owed Before They Must Leave

No-fault terminations in Long Beach generally require 60 days of written notice when the tenant has lived in the unit for a year or longer, and 30 days when the tenancy is shorter than that — the same threshold that applies under state law for most residential tenancies, which the city’s own guidance to landlords incorporates rather than replaces.

The notice period alone, though, is not enough to make a no-fault termination valid under Chapter 8.99. The notice itself has to actually say what it is required to say, or it can be challenged.

For a demolition or substantial-remodel termination specifically, the written notice must include a copy of every permit the owner has already obtained for the work, a description of the scope of that work, and either the anticipated duration of the project or, for a demolition, the expected demolition date.

That last detail matters because it is not optional background information — the ordinance requires the permits to already be in hand before the notice goes out, not applied for afterward.

A notice that specifies the wrong relocation amount, omits the permits, or does not identify which no-fault reason applies can be found void, which means the clock on your 60 days never actually started running.

The City Paperwork Most Landlords Don’t Expect

This is the step that separates Long Beach’s ordinance from a simple statewide no-fault termination, and it is easy to miss if you are only thinking about what you owe the tenant.

For a demolition or substantial-remodel termination, the city requires the owner to file paperwork directly with Long Beach, not just serve the tenant.

Specifically, the city’s published guidance for rental property owners describes a form titled “Notice to City of Long Beach Regarding Tenant Displacement Due to Demolition or Substantial Remodel,” with a separate form required for each individual unit being vacated.

That city-facing form asks for the property address and permit numbers, details on the unit and the scope of work, contact information for the affected tenant, and the owner’s signed statement agreeing to comply with Chapter 8.99.

It also calls for a reasonably detailed explanation of why the work cannot be done safely with the tenant in place and why it requires the unit to sit vacant for at least 30 days — which is the same substantial-remodel threshold discussed above, now documented in writing for the city’s file, not just stated in the tenant notice.

• Obtain all necessary permits from every applicable government agency before issuing the termination notice.
• Complete and submit the city’s tenant-displacement notice form for each unit being vacated.
• Provide the city with the affected tenant’s contact information and the relevant permit numbers.
• Keep a copy of the signed compliance statement, since it is the document that shows you did this correctly if the city or a tenant later disputes it.

Skipping this city-facing filing does not make a demolition or remodel project illegal on its own — it makes the termination notice you served the tenant vulnerable, since the ordinance ties the validity of that notice to the owner having already secured permits and documented the basis for the no-fault reason.

Owners who treat this as paperwork for the tenant alone, and not also for the city, are the ones who end up re-serving notices months later.

What It Costs to Get This Wrong

A termination notice that violates any provision of Chapter 8.99 is void, which in practical terms means you start over: a fresh notice, a fresh notice period, and in some cases a fresh relocation payment.

Beyond that reset, the city’s own published compliance materials note that an owner who intentionally issues an invalid termination notice can face a civil penalty of up to $15,000, in addition to the tenant’s attorney’s fees and costs if the matter ends up in court.

Long Beach also maintains a separate Tenant Harassment Ordinance, codified at LBMC 8.101, that runs alongside Chapter 8.99 rather than replacing it.

That ordinance covers conduct like interrupting housing services, bad-faith delay of repairs, coercing a tenant to vacate, or giving a tenant false information about their rights under the just-cause law — the kind of behavior that sometimes accompanies a rushed or improperly documented no-fault termination.

Penalties under that ordinance run from $2,000 to $5,000 per violation, with an additional penalty of up to $5,000 per violation available where the tenant is 62 or older or disabled, plus a possible award of the tenant’s attorney’s fees.

None of this is designed to punish a landlord with a genuine reason to end a tenancy; it is designed to punish a landlord who treats the no-fault categories as a shortcut around a tenant who is otherwise paying rent and following the lease.

The practical fallout of a void notice is usually worse than the penalty numbers alone suggest.

If your notice is challenged and found void after you have already lined up a buyer, a contractor, or a closing date around the tenant vacating on schedule, you are not just out the relocation payment — you are back to square one on the notice period, with a tenant who now has every reason to scrutinize your next notice closely and a timeline that may no longer line up with a pending sale or remodel contract.

Getting the category, the permits, and the city form right the first time is almost always cheaper than fixing it after a tenant pushes back.

When Selling for Cash Is Not the Right Move

It is worth saying plainly: a fast cash sale is not automatically the better option just because a tenant is involved.

If your tenant is paying close to market rent, your unit does not actually need work that meets the 30-day-vacancy threshold for a substantial remodel, and you have no pressing reason to occupy the property yourself, serving a no-fault notice and paying relocation assistance purely to deliver the house vacant for a sale can cost you more in relocation money, legal risk, and lost rent than simply selling the property with the tenant already in place and letting the buyer step into your position as landlord.

Selling occupied does not trigger Chapter 8.99 at all, because the tenancy continues under new ownership rather than ending.

A traditional listing can also outperform a fast cash sale in raw dollars if you have six to twelve months of runway, a property that shows well, and a tenant willing to cooperate with showings.

A cash sale trades some amount of top-line price for speed, certainty, and not having to front relocation money, permit costs, or vacancy time out of pocket — that trade only makes sense if speed or certainty is actually what you need.

If neither applies to your situation, there is no rush to serve any notice at all, and it may be worth simply holding the property, refinancing, or working out a voluntary move-out with your tenant instead.

Weighing This Against the Bigger Picture

Long Beach’s relocation rule is a local layer on top of statewide protections that apply everywhere in California, and it helps to see how the two fit together before you serve any notice.

Our broader look at how a lease and security deposit carry over when you sell an occupied California rental covers the statewide mechanics that apply regardless of which city the property sits in, and our explainer on what a no-fault eviction requires under the statewide Tenant Protection Act walks through the state-level notice and relocation obligations that Chapter 8.99 builds on top of here in Long Beach.

If you are weighing whether ending a tenancy to sell even makes financial sense in the current rent environment, our analysis of whether small Los Angeles County landlords should hold or sell under the region’s 2026 rent caps runs through a similar hold-versus-sell framework worth adapting to a Long Beach property.

If you’d rather skip the notice period, the relocation payment, and the city filing altogether, Cash Home Buyers CA can put a no-obligation cash offer in front of you on the property as it sits today, tenant in place or not — we buy directly or bring a vetted cash buyer, and when you sell to us, we pay the standard closing costs, including the county and city transfer taxes, escrow and title.

Our page on selling a house with tenants in Long Beach goes further into how an occupied sale sidesteps Chapter 8.99 entirely, and you can find more about the company on our Google Business page.