The Pasadena tenant protection ordinance — Measure H, officially the Pasadena Fair and Equitable Housing Charter Amendment — is a city-level rent cap and just-cause eviction law that took effect December 22, 2022.

It sits on top of California’s statewide AB 1482 and is stricter than it in almost every respect: lower rent caps, a dedicated city agency, and relocation pay that AB 1482 does not require at all.

If you own a tenant-occupied rental inside Pasadena city limits and are weighing a sale, this ordinance — not the state law — controls how much notice you owe, what you may have to pay the tenant to leave, and whether you can even raise the rent in the meantime.

We’ve covered how California’s statewide tenant rules apply to a home sale and the general eviction process elsewhere; this piece is specific to what Pasadena itself adds on top.

Table of Contents

Which Rentals Measure H Actually Covers

The rent cap under Measure H, codified as City Charter Article XVIII, applies to multi-unit residential rental properties built before February 1, 1995.

That date matters more than people expect — a duplex built in 1996 sits outside the rent cap even though it’s two blocks from one built in 1994 that’s fully covered.

Just-cause eviction protection, by contrast, reaches further: it applies to nearly every residential tenancy in the city, including most single-family rentals and newer buildings that the rent cap itself doesn’t touch.

In practice this means an owner of a tenant-occupied Pasadena rental should check two separate questions before assuming anything — is my rent increase capped, and is my tenant protected from a no-cause termination — because the answers can differ for the same property.

What’s Exempt

Measure H carves out several categories, and the same exemptions apply to both the rent cap and the just-cause protections:

A unit where the tenant shares a bathroom or kitchen with the owner
A temporary rental of the owner’s own single-family primary residence, capped at twelve months in any thirty-six-month period
Hotel, motel, or rooming-house stays of less than thirty days
Hospitals, extended medical care facilities, convents and monasteries, dormitories, and licensed drug or alcohol treatment programs
Nonprofit housing for seniors and government-subsidized or tax-credit-restricted affordable units

Condominiums and true single-family homes are generally outside the rent cap specifically, though an owner should not assume a single-family rental is free of just-cause obligations — that protection reaches most tenancies regardless of building type, with the exemptions above being the narrow exceptions rather than the rule.

Why This Is Different From AB 1482

California’s statewide Tenant Protection Act, AB 1482, already caps rent increases and requires a just cause for most no-fault terminations across the state, so an owner might reasonably assume one set of rules covers everything. It doesn’t.

AB 1482 allows annual increases of 5% plus the local CPI, up to a 10% ceiling, and it applies as a statewide floor in cities that haven’t adopted their own, stricter local ordinance.

Pasadena is one of a short list of California cities — alongside places like Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and West Hollywood — that adopted a local ordinance specifically because voters wanted something tighter than the state floor.

Where Measure H applies, it controls; AB 1482 only fills gaps the local ordinance leaves open, such as for properties the city ordinance exempts but the state law still reaches.

An owner who checks only the state law and assumes an 8-10% increase or a simple 60-90 day notice is compliant can find out otherwise the moment the Rent Stabilization Department or a tenant’s attorney points to the actual local rule.

The Rent Stabilization Department and the Rental Housing Board

Measure H is administered day to day by the City of Pasadena’s Rent Stabilization Department, which runs the rental registry, fields landlord and tenant questions, and processes eviction notice filings.

Above the department sits the Pasadena Rental Housing Board, the appointed body that adopts the annual rent-increase figure, hears petitions and appeals, and oversees how the ordinance gets enforced.

An owner dealing with a notice dispute, a registration question, or a petition from a tenant is dealing with the Department first and, if it escalates, the Board.

That’s a meaningfully different structure than most California cities have, where a generic code enforcement office or the city attorney’s office handles rent-control questions as one item among many.

Pasadena built a standing agency around this ordinance specifically, which is part of why it functions more like a formal regulatory system than an informal courtesy policy.

That regulatory structure shows up in an annual requirement most owners of older AB 1482 rentals never deal with: covered units have to be registered with the Rent Stabilization Department.

Registration windows have historically run in the fall — the Department has opened registration for September and October in recent years — and an unregistered unit can create real problems for an owner later, including difficulty collecting a rent increase or defending a notice if a tenant petitions the Board.

An owner who’s been treating a Pasadena rental the way they’d treat a rental anywhere else in Los Angeles County — paying attention to the lease and little else — is the owner most likely to discover a registration or notice-content gap only after a tenant or a buyer’s attorney points one out.

How the Annual Rent Cap Gets Calculated

For covered units, the Rental Housing Board sets what it calls the Annual General Adjustment, under Charter Section 1808.

The formula is 75% of the change in the regional Consumer Price Index for the Los Angeles area, measured over the twelve months ending in March, rounded to the nearest quarter of one percent.

For the cycle running October 1, 2026 through September 30, 2027, the Board adopted a 2.5% figure — 75% of a 3.4% CPI reading, which comes to 2.55% before rounding.

A landlord may raise the rent once every twelve months on a covered unit, with the increase capped at that year’s adopted figure, and written notice of at least thirty days.

If an owner skips a year without raising the rent, that year’s allowance does not carry forward or bank for later use — it’s simply lost.

This is a meaningfully tighter cap than AB 1482’s statewide formula, which allows 5% plus local CPI up to a 10% ceiling; Pasadena’s cap generally runs in the low single digits.

Ending a Tenancy Without Fault: The Ellis Act Path

An owner who wants to exit the rental business entirely — not sell to another landlord, but actually remove the unit from the rental market — can use the Ellis Act, a state law that Pasadena’s ordinance layers city-specific notice requirements onto.

The tenant is owed 120 days’ written notice before the withdrawal takes effect. If a member of the household is a senior or has a disability, that notice period extends to one full year.

This is one of the places where an owner’s sale plans and an Ellis Act withdrawal can get confused: Ellis Act withdrawal is for taking the unit off the rental market altogether (for instance, converting it to owner use or selling it specifically as a vacant, non-rental property), not a general-purpose way to clear a tenant so the unit can be sold and then re-rented by the next owner.

Using it as a shortcut when the underlying intent doesn’t match the law’s purpose is the kind of thing the Rent Stabilization Department and tenant attorneys both watch for.

Owner or Relative Move-In Terminations

A second no-fault path lets an owner end a tenancy to move into the unit personally, or to install a qualifying relative.

The notice has to state the name of the person moving in, their current address, and their relationship to the owner — it can’t be a vague assertion that “the owner intends to occupy.” Once the notice is served, the owner or relative has to actually move in within 60 days and then live there as a primary residence for at least 36 consecutive months.

Skip that window or move back out early, and the owner can face liability for having used the no-fault process in bad faith.

There’s an added wrinkle worth knowing: an owner generally cannot use this path at all against a tenant who has lived in the unit for five years or more and is 60 or older, disabled, or terminally ill, absent narrow exceptions.

For an owner who was hoping to sell to a relative who’d move in and simply wait out a short notice period, the 36-month residency commitment is the detail that changes the math.

Why a Defective Notice Is Worse Than No Notice at All

A no-fault termination notice that’s missing a required element — the wrong relocation figure, a vague owner-move-in statement without the name and relationship the ordinance requires, or a notice that doesn’t cite the correct Just Cause reason — generally doesn’t just get corrected later.

It can be void, which means the tenancy never actually ended, any underlying unlawful detainer filing can be dismissed outright, and the owner is back at day one but now with a tenant who has a documented history of the owner trying to remove them improperly.

That history matters if a tenant later petitions the Rental Housing Board or raises a retaliation defense, since a defective notice becomes evidence for the tenant’s side of that argument, not a neutral paperwork mistake.

This is the practical reason an owner planning a no-fault termination in Pasadena, specifically to sell with vacant possession, should have the notice reviewed against the current ordinance text before serving it rather than adapting a generic California eviction notice template.

How the Two-Part Relocation Payment Works

Every no-fault termination that falls into one of the categories above — Ellis Act withdrawal, owner or relative move-in, necessary repairs or capital improvements that require the unit to sit vacant, or a government order to vacate — triggers a relocation assistance obligation, and the payment itself is structured, not a single lump sum.

Half of the relocation amount is due within 10 days of serving the notice. The remaining half is due when the tenant actually vacates, and an owner is allowed to hold that second half in escrow until the move-out happens rather than handing it over up front.

On top of the base amount, a household with a member who is a senior, has a disability, is terminally ill, or includes a minor child is owed an additional payment beyond what a household without any of those circumstances would receive.

The Rent Stabilization Department publishes the current dollar figures through its own payment-schedule bulletin, which it updates periodically — an owner should pull that current schedule directly from the Department rather than relying on a number repeated secondhand, since the figures are adjusted and a stale number creates real exposure if it’s under what’s actually owed.

A 2025 Court Ruling Narrowed the Ordinance — It Didn’t Gut It

Worth knowing if you’ve read anything secondhand about Pasadena rent control being struck down: in December 2025, the California Court of Appeal ruled in California Apartment Association v. City of Pasadena that one specific piece of Measure H — a relocation payment owed when a rent increase itself was large enough to function as a constructive eviction — was invalid, reasoning that it penalized landlords for exercising a legal right to raise rent within state limits.

The California Supreme Court declined to review that decision in April 2026.

What the ruling did not touch is everything described above: the rent cap itself, the Rent Stabilization Department and Rental Housing Board’s authority, the notice requirements for Ellis Act and owner-move-in terminations, and — critically — the relocation assistance owed for actual no-fault terminations like these remain fully in force.

Only the narrower “rent increase as constructive eviction” relocation trigger was removed. An owner should treat the core ordinance as fully active and not assume a headline about a court striking down Pasadena rent control means the notice and relocation rules above have gone away, because they haven’t.

When a Cash Sale Isn’t Actually the Right Move

Selling with a tenant in place isn’t automatically the better option, and it’s worth saying plainly where it isn’t.

If a tenant is already paying close to market rent — which happens more often than owners expect on a unit that’s turned over in the last few years — the rent cap isn’t costing much, and waiting out the lease or the tenancy on its own timeline may cost less than triggering a no-fault termination and its relocation obligation.

If the goal is simply to stop being a landlord rather than to sell quickly, a longer-term tenant approaching the five-year, senior-or-disabled protection threshold described above may be nearly impossible to remove through an owner move-in anyway, which can make a sale to a buyer who’s willing to take the property with the lease and tenant intact — rather than one who needs it vacant — the more realistic and often cheaper path.

And if the unit is genuinely exempt from the rent cap (built after February 1995, or a true single-family exemption) and the tenant relationship is otherwise fine, there may be no ordinance-driven reason to sell at all right now.

A relocation-cost estimate pulled from the Department’s current schedule, compared honestly against months of carrying costs or a vacancy-and-relist timeline, is the number that should actually decide this, not a general sense that tenant-occupied property is a hassle.

What This Looks Like If You Decide to Sell

If the relocation math, the notice timelines, or simply the ongoing compliance burden of a registered, rent-capped unit point toward selling, an owner has two basic paths: terminate the tenancy through one of the no-fault processes above and sell with vacant possession, or sell the property with the tenant and lease in place to a buyer who intends to keep it as a rental.

The second path avoids triggering any notice period or relocation payment at all, since the tenancy simply continues under the new owner, and it’s the more common route for an owner who wants to exit without taking on Ellis Act or owner-move-in obligations first.

Either way, documentation matters: the rent increase history (to confirm every increase stayed inside the adopted Annual General Adjustment), the registration status with the Rent Stabilization Department, the current signed lease, and the security deposit ledger are the items a knowledgeable buyer will ask for before making a serious offer, and having them ready shortens the process considerably.

A no-obligation cash offer from Cash Home Buyers CA can account for a tenant-occupied Pasadena rental exactly as it sits today, lease, rent-cap history and all — we buy directly or bring a vetted cash buyer who’s comfortable taking over the tenancy, so there’s no need to run an Ellis Act or owner-move-in process just to get an offer.

See our page on selling a house with tenants in Pasadena for how that works locally, or find more detail through our Google Business Profile.

Pasadena Tenant Protection Ordinance: Notice & Pay Rules