Terms of service. A calculator, a generator, a log — not a lawyer.

RentCeiling computes the statutory rent-cap for a unit from public statute and public CPI data, and renders a notice PDF using the language and effective-date math the statute prescribes. The output is deterministic: same inputs, same rule-set version, same answer.

That is not the same as legal advice, and we are not your attorney. No attorney-client relationship is created by your use of this product. No employee or contractor of RentCeiling is licensed to practice law on your behalf. The notice PDFs we render are documents you have chosen to serve; we are not representing you in any landlord-tenant matter.

If your tenant disputes a rent increase, if a tenant attorney sends a demand letter, if you receive an audit notice from a rent board (LA RSO, Berkeley Rent Board, San Francisco Rent Board, NYC Division of Housing & Community Renewal, or similar), or if your unit is in a jurisdiction we have not yet shipped, you should consult counsel. The compliance log is a tool that helps you and your counsel; it does not replace counsel.

RentCeiling does not warrant that the rule data is current beyond the “Last refresh” date shown on each jurisdiction page. CPI figures publish annually. Local ordinances change at the city-council pace. We refresh promptly, but a 24-hour gap between the publication of a new figure and the deployment of an updated rule-set is possible. Use the rule-set version hash in your compliance log row to defend the calc that was current on the day you served.

You may use RentCeiling if you are at least 18 years old, you are using it for a property you own, manage, or are otherwise lawfully authorized to set the rent on, and your use does not violate the law of the U.S. state and city where the property sits. RentCeiling is not directed at users outside the United States and the rule-set is U.S.-only.

Property managers, real-estate counsel, and bookkeepers acting on behalf of an owner may use the product on the owner’s behalf. The compliance log is keyed to the account’s email address; if multiple parties share an account, every action is recorded against that single email.

• Free calculator. The legal-max calculator on the home page and on every jurisdiction landing is free, requires no account, and is intended to stay free indefinitely. We reserve the right to rate-limit obvious abuse (hundreds of calls per minute from the same IP) at the Caddy layer.
• Pay-per-notice ($9). A one-shot Stripe Checkout that returns one PDF and one compliance-log row. The fee is final once the PDF is delivered and downloadable. If a technical defect on our side prevents the PDF from being generated or downloaded, we issue a full refund within 7 days of you reporting the defect.
• Pro monthly ($19/month). Unlimited notices, unlimited compliance-log rows, multi-jurisdiction dashboard, CSV/PDF export. Billed monthly via Stripe; cancel any time from the account UI; the cancellation is effective at the end of the current billing month and you keep access until then. We refund a Pro charge in full within 14 days if you have not generated more than three notices on it.
• Legal Pro ($49/month, future). A multi-tenant dashboard for attorneys representing multiple landlord clients. Pricing and feature scope are subject to change before launch.

Prices listed are in U.S. dollars and exclude any sales tax that the jurisdiction of your billing address requires us to collect. We will list any applicable tax separately at checkout.

• Do not redistribute the rule-set as a competing product. The JSON files at /rules/ are public and you can reference them, link to them, or quote them in attribution. You may not scrape the entire rule-set, repackage it, and sell access to it.
• Do not use the notice PDFs to commit fraud. Generating a notice for a unit you don’t own or are not authorized to set the rent on, or backdating a notice, is a misuse of the product and may also be a violation of the rent-control statute and of state criminal law.
• Do not use it as a substitute for licensed counsel in matters that require licensed counsel: an active tenant dispute, an unlawful-detainer action, a rent-board petition, or any contested administrative proceeding. The product is a calculator; your attorney is your attorney.
• Do not abuse the API or the calculator endpoint. Automated requests at a rate that meaningfully degrades the service for other users will be rate-limited or blocked.
• Do not attempt to bypass the security or paywall. No reverse-engineering, no probing for vulnerabilities you are not authorized to probe (security researchers, see § 8 below).

Ours: the RentCeiling name, logo, the product UI, the JSON rule-set as compiled here (the underlying statutes are public and are not copyrightable; the structure, normalization, and citation graph we’ve built around them is), the calculator algorithm, and the codebase. You are granted a non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use them for the purpose of running rent-cap calcs and serving notices on your own units.

Yours: the notice PDFs you generate, your compliance log rows, the unit data and tenant data you enter. You may export, archive, distribute, file in court, attach to a rent-board petition, or otherwise use them however you need to. We claim no ownership over the documents you create with the tool.

Public: the underlying statutes, ordinances, regulations, and CPI data referenced by the rule-set. Cal. Civ. Code § 1947.12, Berkeley Municipal Code Ch. 13.76, ORS § 90.323, NYC Rent Stabilization Law, DC Official Code § 42-3502.08, and so on are public law. Anyone may cite them; we do not claim ownership and we do not gate your access to them.

You can terminate your Pro account at any time from the account UI. The cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing month; you retain access to the compliance log and the export feature until then. After termination, we retain your compliance-log data for 7 years (in case you need to defend a calc you served while subscribed) unless you ask us to delete it sooner via the data-deletion process described in /privacy § 5.

We can terminate or suspend your account if you materially breach § 4 (acceptable use), if your payment fails for more than 30 days, or if your jurisdiction is no longer one we can lawfully serve. We will email you the reason and give you 30 days to export your compliance log before any data deletion, except where the breach is severe enough (active fraud, attempted security compromise) that immediate suspension is warranted.

RentCeiling is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis. We disclaim, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, all warranties not expressly stated in these terms — including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of harmful components, that any defects in the rule-set or the calculator will be corrected within any specific time, or that the result of any specific calc is the correct answer for any specific unit. Always confirm with counsel for disputes or edge cases.

Limitation of liability. RentCeiling’s aggregate liability under these terms, whether in contract, tort, statute, or any other legal theory, is capped at the greater of (a) the total fees you paid to RentCeiling in the twelve months preceding the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) $100. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, or lost business opportunity. Some jurisdictions don’t allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages; in those jurisdictions, our liability is limited to the smallest amount the law allows.

If you have identified a security vulnerability in RentCeiling, please write to security@rentceiling.com with a description, steps to reproduce, and the impact you believe it has. We treat good-faith security research as authorized under these terms, will not pursue legal action against researchers who follow a coordinated-disclosure process, and aim to acknowledge reports within 3 business days. Please do not access data that is not yours, do not run automated scans that meaningfully degrade the service, and do not publicly disclose details until we have had a reasonable chance to investigate and remediate.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The U.S. Federal Arbitration Act, U.S. federal arbitration law, and where applicable, the laws of the U.S. state where you reside, also apply. The exclusive forum for any dispute that is not subject to arbitration is the state or federal courts in San Francisco, California.

Informal resolution first. Before filing a claim, you agree to email legal@rentceiling.com with a description of the dispute and a proposed resolution, and to give RentCeiling 60 days to attempt to resolve the dispute informally. The same applies to claims RentCeiling brings against you.

Class-action waiver. Disputes are resolved on an individual basis. Both parties waive the right to bring or participate in any class, consolidated, or representative action. This section does not bar an individual public-injunctive-relief claim under California law where such a claim is non-waivable as a matter of state public policy.

If we change a non-material part of these terms — rewording for clarity, fixing a typo, adding a section that doesn’t change what you owe us or what we promise you — we update the “Effective” date at the top and the change is live. If we change a material part — raising a fee for a plan you’re currently on, narrowing the refund window, expanding the acceptable-use restrictions, changing the dispute-resolution forum, or changing the limitation of liability — we email Pro subscribers 30 days before the change takes effect, and you may cancel for a prorated refund if you do not accept the new terms.

• Entire agreement. These terms plus our privacy policy and any plan-specific terms shown at checkout are the whole agreement between us. They supersede any prior or contemporaneous communications.
• Severability. If a court holds any provision unenforceable, the rest of the agreement remains in force.
• No waiver. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of that provision in any future dispute.
• Assignment. You may not assign these terms without our written consent. We may assign them as part of a corporate reorganization, merger, or sale of substantially all of our assets, on notice to you.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for delays or failures caused by events beyond reasonable control (acts of God, war, civil unrest, internet-backbone outages, government action, the public-health emergency-of-the-day).
• Notices. Notices to you are sent to the email address on your account. Notices to us go to legal@rentceiling.com.

For terms questions and disputes: legal@rentceiling.com. For privacy questions: privacy@rentceiling.com. For everything else: hi@rentceiling.com. See also our privacy policy.