MHCO Note: Although the limit for 2025 will be set at 10%, housing providers should be aware that legislative action in 2025 could quickly change the limit formula downward.
|Published: Sep. 23, 2024, 'Oregonian'.
Oregon landlords are allowed to raise rents by up to 10% in many residences next year, state officials said on Monday.
Oregon passed its first-in-the-nation rent control law in 2019 in what supporters cast as a way to stabilize unregulated price increases. Lawmakers modified the law in 2023 to set a ceiling at the lesser of 7% plus inflation or 10%.
Since Oregon implemented rent control in 2019, the cap has equaled about 9% to 10%, according to the Department of Administrative Services, except in 2023 when it reached 14.6% for half the year amid blistering inflation.
That was a turning point for the statewide law, as renters’ rights groups expressed dismay and claimed the high allowable increases would cause more evictions.
Landlord representatives have said that property taxes and housing demand are generally more influential on their pricing decisions that the rent cap formula, and that most rent increases come in below the statutory maximum.
The rate reset to 10% in mid-2023 after lawmakers voted to install an upper limit. It held at 10% in 2024 and will be the same in 2025, as calculated by the stats’s Office of Economic Analysis, which by law must issue a rate by Sept. 30 annually.
The law doesn’t affect rentals built in the past 15 years. It only regulates older houses and apartments
