Can You Rent Your ADU?

The building is legal (Module 12.12's certificate made sure). Now the question the whole rental strategy rests on: can you actually rent it? Yes — with a few lines worth knowing before you list.

Long-term rental: fully protected. Renting your ADU for 30 days or longer is exactly what state ADU law was written to enable — and remember lesson 5.6: no owner-occupancy requirement means you can rent the ADU, the house, or both, living wherever you like. (The JADU exception from 13.5 stands: those generally require an owner on the property.)

Short-term rental: assume no. State law lets — and 2026-era law increasingly requires — cities to impose 30-day minimum stays on ADUs, and most California cities do exactly that. JADUs are barred from sub-30-day rentals statewide. The Airbnb-the-backyard plan usually dies here; check your city's short-term rental ordinance before building a business case on it (lesson 14.7 runs the comparison anyway).

The certificate-first rule. No lease before the certificate of occupancy — full stop (12.12 explained why: leases on un-certified units are legally hollow, and California courts have made illegal-unit landlording spectacularly unprofitable). This module assumes you finished the course in order.

What renting one unit on your own property means legally: you're a landlord under California law — security deposit limits (one month's rent under current law), habitability obligations, entry-notice rules (24 hours, proper purpose), and statewide rent-control/just-cause rules that may apply depending on your situation (single-family-with-ADU configurations have nuances worth a landlord association membership or an hour with a landlord-tenant attorney — cheap relative to getting it wrong).

The lease itself — ADU-specific items worth writing down: utilities arrangement (Module 7.2's decision, now a lease clause — flat fee, submeter pass-through, or tenant's own account); parking (which spot, if any — 5.5's honesty about real-world parking); yard boundaries and shared-space expectations (8.5's two-zones design, now in words); quiet-hours symmetry (they can hear you too); and access paths, trash day, and mailboxes. The physical design decisions you made in Module 8 become paragraph headings — that was the point of making them deliberately.