Oregon's 2027 Max Rent Increase Is 10%, and Why You May Not Want to Use It

The Oregon Department of Administrative Services confirmed on September 28, 2026 that the maximum allowable rent increase for calendar year 2027 is 10%, up from 9.5% in 2026. That is the answer to the question I have already gotten a dozen times this week from landlords in Salem and Keizer. The cap is set under ORS 90.324(b), and 10% is the statutory ceiling, which means the formula maxed out again this year.

Here is where I am going to stop you before you go write "10%" on every notice you are about to send out. The cap is a legal limit, not a target. In many past year I have watched landlords treat the maximum allowable increase like it is the number they are entitled to every single year, but in the current rental environment that is how a paying, respectful tenant turns into a vacancy, a turnover cost, and a new round of screening. A good tenant is worth more than the extra percentage point, and I will explain why before we get into the mechanics of the law.

Oregon's 2027 Maximum Rent Increase Is 10%

For most residential tenancies covered by Oregon's rent stabilization law, a landlord cannot raise rent more than 10% over a 12 month period starting in 2027. That is a half point higher than the 9.5% ceiling that applied through 2026. Every outlet that covered this announcement is reporting the same number, so let me spend my time on the part that actually matters to you as an owner, which is what you do with that number.

Hitting the Cap Every Year Is Not a Strategy, It Is a Bet Against Your Own Tenant

I tell every landlord I work with that tenant screening is the whole ballgame. Get a good tenant in place, someone who pays on time and takes care of the unit, and the entire ownership experience is simple and rewarding. Get a bad one, and you will rethink your whole strategy. So once you have a good tenant, the math on a rent increase has to include the cost of losing them, not just the cost of leaving money on the table.

Think about what actually happens if you push a long term tenant to the full legal cap and they decide to move instead of pay it. You lose a month, maybe two, to turnover and cleaning. You are back to advertising, screening, and hoping the next applicant is as good as the one who just left. If you need a refresher on what that screening process should look like, I wrote a full walkthrough in screening tenants as a new landlord, and the short version is that the process only works if you are consistent every time, not just when it is convenient. A 10% increase on paper is not worth much if it costs you two months of vacancy and a new search to fill the unit.

How Oregon Calculates the Cap Each Year

The state does not pick this number out of thin air. Each year, DAS calculates the maximum allowable increase as the lesser of 10%, or 7% plus the applicable Consumer Price Index, and the state's own rent stabilization page confirms that figure has to be published no later than September 30 for the following calendar year. In 2023, inflation pushed that calculated number all the way up to 14.6% before the legislature stepped in and capped it at 10%. For 2027, the formula landed back on that 10% ceiling, same as it did for several years running, which tells you the cap has mostly been doing its job as a backstop rather than a moving target tied purely to inflation.

Notice, Timing, and Frequency Rules You Cannot Skip

The percentage is only half of what you have to get right. A few rules apply regardless of how big or small your increase is:

• Rent generally cannot be increased at all during the first year of a tenancy.
• After that first year, a landlord generally has to give at least 90 days written notice before an increase takes effect.
• Rent generally cannot be raised more than once in any 12 month period.

These are the kinds of details that trip up owners who are handling their own rentals without a background in the law, and Oregon's landlord-tenant rules have shifted enough over the past six or seven years that an amateur really can get hurt here. If you are unsure how these rules interact with a specific lease or a tenancy that is already in a dispute, that is a conversation for an attorney, not a blog post, and it is the same logic I use when I tell buyers not to handle a contract addendum on their own. I have the scar tissue to prove it. On a land deal a while back, I wrote an earnest money release for a seller and left the word "nonrefundable" out of the addendum. The buyer's attorney found the gap, the seller had to refund $25,000, and I put $5,000 toward fixing it. One missing word cost real money, and rent notices are exactly the kind of document where a missing detail turns into a dispute nobody wanted.

New Construction and Manufactured Home Exemptions

Not every rental is subject to the percentage cap at all. Properties whose first certificate of occupancy was issued less than 15 years before the rent increase notice are exempt from the statutory percentage limit. That matters more than people realize in a market like ours, where new construction has been steadily adding units around Salem and Keizer, and an owner of a newer building may be operating under a completely different set of rules than the owner next door with a 1985 fourplex. Separate and generally lower caps apply to certain larger manufactured home parks and marina facilities, which is its own set of rules entirely and worth confirming with a professional if that describes your property.

If you are evaluating whether a property you are buying, or already own, falls inside or outside that 15 year exemption window, that is exactly the kind of detail I walk through with clients when they are evaluating rental property investments in Salem-Keizer. It changes how you think about future rent growth on a property, and it is not something you want to guess at after you already own it.

What a 10 Percent Increase Actually Looks Like in Dollars

I am not going to quote you a typical Salem or Keizer rent, because I only use verified numbers in my writing, and average rent figures for this market need to come from actual comps pulled at the time, not a guess dropped into a blog post. What I can give you is the formula, and you can run your own numbers.

New rent equals current rent multiplied by one plus the increase percentage divided by 100. So, purely as a hypothetical to show how the math works, say a unit is renting for $1,200 a month. A 10% increase would be $1,200 times 1.10, which comes out to $1,320, a jump of $120 a month. If that same landlord wanted to send the notice on October 1, 2026, the earliest legal effective date would land roughly 90 days later, around December 30, 2026, assuming no increase had already been applied within the prior 12 months and the tenant was not still inside their first year. Those are the same checks I built into the simple notice calculator on this site: current rent, proposed percentage, notice date, and tenancy start date, and it will flag if you are inside the first year restriction or stacking increases too close together.

Check These Things Before You Send the Increase Notice

Before you send anything, confirm three things. First, whether your property falls under the statutory cap at all or qualifies for the new construction exemption. Second, whether your tenant has been in place long enough, and whether you have already used your one increase for the 12 month window. Third, and this is the one most people skip, whether the size of the increase you are about to send is actually worth what it might cost you if that tenant decides to leave instead of pay it. If you are weighing whether to hold a rental long term at all, or whether it is time to sell and reinvest elsewhere, that decision often starts with the same math as this one, which I cover when I talk through investing in multi-unit rental properties with first time buyers.

Questions people ask

How do you go about finding the market rent for certain properties?

I pull current active and pending comps directly and compare unit size, condition, and amenities against what is actually leasing nearby, rather than quoting an average number that does not apply to a specific property. Market rent changes property by property and month by month, so the only honest way to answer this is to run the actual comps at the time you are asking, not rely on a number from six months ago.

Do you charge late fees to your tenants?

Oregon law allows late fees within certain limits, and the way I advise landlords to handle it is to spell out the exact dollar amount and the grace period directly in the lease itself, rather than deciding case by case what feels fair after the fact. Consistency is the whole point. If the lease says a fee applies after a certain date, it applies every time, to every tenant, the same way.

What type of screening goes into finding a tenant?

The screening criteria has to be applied the same way to every single applicant, which is why I tell landlords to write their standards down before they ever look at an application, not decide as people walk in the door. That usually means income verification, rental history, and a background check run consistently, and it is the single biggest factor in whether your ownership experience is easy or a headache. I go into the full process in screening tenants as a new landlord.

If you own rental property in Salem or Keizer and you are trying to figure out what a fair increase looks like for your specific tenant and unit, run the numbers first, then make the call, and if you want a second set of eyes on the comps or the notice timing, that is a conversation I am glad to have before you send anything out.

Jordan Sparks

Principal Broker, Sparks Property Group at SMI Real Estate. Specializing in Multifamily and Investment property in Salem, Keizer, and the Willamette Valley. Licensed in Oregon, #200610098.

jordan@smire.com · 541.646.0650

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