10 records
How many days notice does a landlord have to give before evicting for nonpayment of rent?
Across 10 records, notice period in days runs from 3 (4 states) to 14 (3 states), and 3 is the most common — 4 of them. Every value is transcribed from the source that states it and carries the sentence it was taken from: 10 sources across 10 sites, last checked 2026-09-02, due for re-check by 2027-09-02. Every record is listed below, each linking the page its value came from.
About this data
Before a landlord can file an eviction for nonpayment of rent, nearly every state requires a written demand or notice and a waiting period — three days in California, Florida and Texas, five in Illinois and Arizona, ten in Pennsylvania, fourteen in Washington, Virginia and Massachusetts. The periods are not comparable on their face: California and Florida exclude weekends and holidays, Texas sets a floor a lease may lengthen, Illinois sets a floor the notice itself must exceed, and Georgia counts business days. Georgia is also the state most reference charts still get wrong — it long had no statutory waiting period for nonpayment at all, and the Safe at Home Act (HB 404) added a three-business-day notice to vacate or pay for residential leases entered into or renewed on or after July 1, 2024; FindLaw's own mirror of O.C.G.A. 44-7-50 was still serving the pre-amendment text when this was built, so Georgia here is quoted from the signed bill. Each record is one state, scoped to the nonpayment-of-rent ground only (lease violation, no-cause and holdover run on different clocks and are out of scope), with the notice period exactly as the statute states it, whether the tenant can stop the eviction by paying within that window, and the statute citation — each backed by a verbatim quote from the state's own statute or its official session-law text. Ten states so far, chosen because the legislature or code revisor serves the section as readable text; more are added as they are confirmed reachable. Answers 'how many days notice before eviction for nonpayment in [state]' and 'can I still pay and stop the eviction'.
The data
| State | Notice period | Notice period in days | Right to cure by paying | Statute |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arizona | five days after written notice by the landlord of nonpayment | 5 | Yes, and it survives the deadline. “Before the filing of a special detainer action the rental agreement shall be reinstated if the tenant tenders all past due and unpaid periodic rent and a reasonable late fee set forth in a written rental agreement.” After filing, reinstatement also requires attorney fees and court costs. | A.R.S. § 33-1368(B) |
| California | three days’ notice, excluding Saturdays and Sundays and other judicial holidays | 3 | Yes. The three-day notice must require “its payment … or possession of the property”, so paying the amount stated within the three days ends the default and no unlawful detainer arises. | Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 1161(2) |
| Florida | 3 days, excluding Saturday, Sunday, and legal holidays | 3 | Yes. The written demand is for “payment of the rent or possession of the premises”, so the tenant who pays within the 3 days keeps the tenancy. | Fla. Stat. § 83.56(3) |
| Georgia | three-day notice to vacate or pay | 3 | Yes, since the Safe at Home Act. For residential leases entered into or renewed on or after July 1, 2024, O.C.G.A. § 44-7-50(c) lets the tenant stop the dispossessory by paying all past due rent, late fees, utilities and other charges owed within three business days of the notice. Under the older § 44-7-50(a) route, which still governs leases predating that date, the statute sets no waiting period at all — the owner demands possession and, on refusal, may go to court immediately. | O.C.G.A. § 44-7-50(c)-(d), as enacted by Ga. L. 2024, HB 404 (Safe at Home Act) |
| Illinois | not less than 5 days after service thereof | 5 | Yes, but only payment in full. The notice must state that “Only FULL PAYMENT of the rent demanded in this notice will waive the landlord's right to terminate the lease under this notice, unless the landlord agrees in writing to continue the lease in exchange for receiving partial payment.” | 735 ILCS 5/9-209 |
| Massachusetts | fourteen days' notice to quit | 14 | Yes, but only once a year. A tenant at will who has not had a similar notice in the preceding twelve months keeps the tenancy by paying or tendering the full amount of rent due within ten days after receiving the notice. | Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 186, § 12 |
| Pennsylvania | within ten days from the date of the service thereof | 10 | Not in the notice section. Section 503(c) of the same act lets the tenant, “at any time before any writ of possession is actually executed … in any case for the recovery of possession solely because of failure to pay rent due”, stop the eviction by paying the rent in arrears and the costs. | 68 P.S. § 250.501(b) (Landlord and Tenant Act of 1951, § 501(b)) |
| Texas | at least three days' written notice to vacate the premises before the landlord files a forcible detainer suit, unless the parties have contracted for a shorter or longer notice period in a written lease or agreement | 3 | Only through the form of the notice. Where possession is terminated solely for nonpayment and the tenant was not late before that month, the notice “shall be given in the form of a notice to pay rent or vacate”; § 24.005 states no separate right to reinstate the lease by paying. | Tex. Prop. Code § 24.005(a) |
| Virginia | 14 days after written notice is served | 14 | Yes. The landlord may terminate only if the tenant “fails to pay rent within 14 days after written notice is served”, so payment inside the 14-day period preserves the rental agreement. | Va. Code § 55.1-1245(F) |
| Washington | 14 days after service for tenancies under chapter 59.18 RCW | 14 | Yes. The notice requires “in the alternative the payment of the rent or the surrender of the detained premises”, so paying within the notice period leaves it complied with and no unlawful detainer arises. | RCW 59.12.030(3) |
Where this came from
Every record above links the page it was taken from and quotes the sentence that states it. These are the 10 sources this dataset was assembled from.
- azleg.govhttps://www.azleg.gov/ars/33/01368.htm
- leginfo.legislature.ca.govhttps://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=1161.&lawCode=CCP
- leg.state.fl.ushttps://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0000-0099/0083/Sections/0083.56.html
- gov.georgia.govhttps://gov.georgia.gov/document/2024-signed-legislation/hb-404/download
- ilga.govhttps://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/documents/073500050K9-209.htm
- malegislature.govhttps://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartII/TitleI/Chapter186/Section12
- legis.state.pa.ushttps://www.legis.state.pa.us/WU01/LI/LI/US/HTM/1951/0/0020..HTM
- codes.findlaw.comhttps://codes.findlaw.com/tx/property-code/prop-sect-24-005/
- law.lis.virginia.govhttps://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title55.1/chapter13/section55.1-1245/
- app.leg.wa.govhttps://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=59.12.030
Machine-readable
- data.jsonThe whole dataset — every record with its source URL and source quote.
- Open Knowledge Format bundleOne JSON object per line — every record's frontmatter and quoted span exactly as it is held here, in one fetch.
- data.csvThe same records as one flat table, for a spreadsheet or a dataframe. The last four columns are the source URL, the quoted sentence it was read from, the date we last checked it, and which columns are our reading rather than the page's words.
- How this is made and checkedWhat "verified against source" does and does not mean.
Set your AI assistant up to use this
Two files and no account. Put this in .mcp.json at the root of your project — Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and Codex all read that file — and your assistant can look this dataset up instead of recalling it. The server is remote, keyless and read-only.
{
"mcpServers": {
"referencesource": {
"type": "http",
"url": "https://referencesource.org/mcp"
}
}
}Add to Cursor · or, on the command line: claude mcp add --transport http referencesource https://referencesource.org/mcp --scope project
Then one line in the project's CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, so the assistant knows when to reach for it:
When a question needs "Eviction notice periods for nonpayment of rent by US state — how long a landlord must wait, quoted from the state statute", call the referencesource MCP server at https://referencesource.org/mcp (tool `search_records`, dataset_slug `eviction-notice-periods-for-nonpayment-by-state`) instead of answering from memory — every record it returns carries its source URL and a verbatim quote from that page.What each tool does, and the servers built over single registers: Connect your AI assistant.