PRO Vs. FAIR: Chicago’s Two Renter Ordinances, Compared

Neither of the two renter ordinances waiting for a vote of the Chicago City Council requires just cause, the rule that a landlord may end or decline to renew a tenancy only for a reason the law lists, and both would cap a security deposit, which the current code does not: at one month’s rent in the mayor’s text and one and a half in the other. The mayor’s ordinance, which his office calls the Protecting Renters Ordinance or PRO, contained a just-cause rule and a relocation payment for displaced tenants when it was filed on June 29, 2026; the substitute that a Council committee approved on September 16 contains neither. The competing ordinance, which its sponsors call FAIR, was filed on July 15 and approved by a different committee on September 17. The two texts now part ways on specifics. The mayor’s caps an application fee at $20, allows no move-in fee, and has landlords pay $20 to $60 per unit each year to register their rentals. FAIR caps the application fee at $50, allows a move-in fee tied to the landlord’s costs, and sets registration every two years with no registration payment in its text. The Council put off both on September 23 and, by one outlet’s report, again on September 29. Neither is law.

City Clerk records SO2026-0026554 and SO2026-0027202 and both substitute ordinances, read in full September 30, 2026 · the mayor’s original filing of June 29, 2026, read for what the substitute removed

Updated October 19, 2026, with the Council’s October 14 meeting. The comparison itself was rebuilt on September 30, 2026 from the two substitute texts. This page was first published on July 17, 2026, as a comparison drawn from the city’s description of the mayor’s ordinance and from Block Club Chicago’s reporting on both proposals, which have since been rewritten in committee. Correction: the first version said the mayor’s ordinance came out in May 2026. The city’s press release is dated June 29, 2026, although its web address files it under May, and the City Clerk’s record gives the same date for the filing.

Where the two ordinances stand on October 19, 2026

The City Clerk’s record for the mayor’s ordinance, number SO2026-0026554, shows it filed on June 29, 2026, and sent to the Committee on Housing and Real Estate. On September 16 that committee replaced it with a 41-page substitute and sent the substitute to the full Council. Block Club Chicago reported the committee vote as 12 to 9. The record for FAIR, number SO2026-0027202, names Ald. Gilbert Villegas as the filing sponsor and lists 22 sponsors in all. It shows the ordinance filed on July 15, then replaced by a 25-page substitute and sent to the Council on September 17 by the Committee on Zoning, Landmarks and Building Standards, a vote Block Club reported as 12 to 6.

The last entry on both records is the same: “Deferred and Published” at the Council meeting of September 23, which means the vote was put off. The Real Deal reported that the Council put the two off a second time on September 29. Neither was on the agenda of the Council’s October 14 meeting, and both records still ended at September 23 when we read them again on October 19. The next meeting on the Clerk’s calendar, a special session on October 21, is called for the mayor’s 2027 budget. Until one of them passes and takes effect, the rules in force are the ones already in the city code: no ceiling on a security deposit, interest owed on deposits, and no reason required to end a lease at its term, with 30, 60 or 120 days’ written notice depending on how long the tenant has lived there.

What both texts would change

What would a Chicago renter get under either text? Both substitutes rewrite the same law, the Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance, which dates to 1986 and sets the rules for most rentals in the city. On a long list of points they rewrite it the same way.

Security deposits. The current code sets no ceiling on a deposit. Both texts set one: one month’s rent in the mayor’s, one and a half months’ rent in FAIR. Both delete the interest that landlords now owe on deposits held more than six months; interest already earned when the change takes effect stays the tenant’s. Under both, a landlord who fails to return a deposit owes the tenant twice its amount. Today that doubled amount, plus interest, is owed for a breach of any of the deposit rules.
Repairs. The current code lets a tenant have a defect fixed and deduct the cost from rent, a remedy known as repair and deduct, when the cost does not exceed, in the code’s words, “the greater of $500.00 or one-half of the monthly rent,” and is no more than one month’s rent. Both texts change the $500 to $1,500, delete the one-month limit, and require the work to be done by a licensed professional. Both also put a ceiling, the greater of $1,500 or half the monthly rent, on the rent a tenant may withhold over an unrepaired problem. The code now allows an amount that reflects the reduced value of the unit and sets no dollar ceiling.
Late fees. The code limits a late fee to $10 a month on the first $500 of rent plus 5 percent of the rent above that. Both texts move the $500 line to $1,000. By our arithmetic, on a rent of $1,500 the ceiling falls from $60 to $35.
Illegal lockouts. The fine for putting a tenant out without legal authority is now $200 to $500 for each day. The mayor’s text sets $2,500 plus $1,000 for each day the lockout continues. FAIR sets $2,500 to $5,000 plus the same $1,000 a day.
Retaliation. Both add a presumption. If a landlord ends a tenancy, raises the rent or cuts services within a year after a tenant complained about conditions or used a legal right, the act is presumed to be retaliation unless the landlord shows otherwise. Both add complaints made on social media to the protected list.
Rent-setting software. Both require a written disclosure at the start or renewal of a lease when pricing software was used. The mayor’s text covers any third-party revenue-management software and has the landlord name it. FAIR covers software that uses dynamic pricing or non-public data on competitors’ rents.
Lease terms. Both bar lease clauses that turn unpaid charges into rent or let a landlord apply a rent payment to some other charge. Both raise what a tenant can recover when a landlord fails to disclose a foreclosure case from $200 to $1,000.
A registry and an office. Both create a registry of rental units, require the landlord to hand a tenant a copy of the unit’s registration at the start of a lease, and create a city office to administer the landlord-tenant law. The two registries and the two offices are built differently, as the next section shows.

Where the two texts differ

The two substitute ordinances as their committees approved them on September 16 and 17, 2026
Provision	Mayor’s text (PRO)	FAIR
Security deposit cap	1 month’s rent	1.5 months’ rent
Application fee cap	$20	$50
Move-in fee	Not allowed	Allowed, tied to costs
Registration renewal	Every year	Every 2 years
Payment per unit	$20 to $60 a year	None in the text
Registry asks for	Owners, rent, unit details	4 contact items
Department in charge	Housing	Buildings
Lockout fine, plus $1,000 a day	$2,500	$2,500 to $5,000
Eviction legal help	Program, if funded	None
Main effective date	Jan. 1, 2027	July 1, 2027

On fees the two texts take different approaches. The mayor’s text works from a closed list. Besides rent, a landlord may collect a security deposit, up to one month of prepaid rent, and the fees the section names: an application fee capped at $20 or at the landlord’s actual screening costs if those are lower, one pet fee, at-cost charges for things such as a duplicate key or a returned payment, optional services the tenant asks for in writing, and utilities at the billed amount with no markup. Any other fee is prohibited, and a move-in fee is not on the list. FAIR starts from state law. It adopts the fee rules of the Illinois Landlord and Tenant Act, requires every non-optional fee to appear on the first page of the lease, caps the application fee at $50 with documented third-party screening costs above that billable to the applicant, and states that a landlord may collect a move-in fee reasonably related to the estimated costs of a tenant moving in. Under both texts a tenant who supplies a reusable screening report pays no application fee.

The registries differ in what they collect and what they cost. The mayor’s would be renewed every year, with the first registration due January 15, 2027. Its form asks for the building’s address and parcel number, each unit’s bedrooms, vacancy and monthly rent, the manager and the repair contact, and the ownership: every person holding 20 percent or more of an owning company, or the five largest holders if no one reaches 20 percent. Owners pay $20 per unit a year in buildings of one to four units, $40 in buildings of five to 49 and $60 in buildings of 50 or more. Owner-occupied buildings of one to six units, units owned or subsidized by the Chicago Housing Authority, the Low-Income Housing Trust Fund or the city’s Residential Investment Corporation, and regulated affordable units are exempt from the payment. The Real Deal reported a city staff estimate that the payments would bring in $22.4 million a year. The Department of Housing would post the public part of the registry online, together with inspection results and registration violations, and keep it available for at least ten years. Which fields are public is left to rules the department would write.

FAIR’s registry would be renewed every two years and, in the text’s words, “shall include only” four things: the building’s address, and the names and contacts of the owner or agent, of the manager, and of the person who takes repair requests. It states no registration payment. What FAIR would publish is a searchable record of documented violations: illegal lockouts, withheld deposits, retaliation, and willful failure to maintain a unit, each established by a final administrative or court decision, with repeat violators labeled as such.

Who would enforce all this? Under the mayor’s text, the Department of Housing, through a new Bureau of Rental Housing Services that takes complaints and 311 service requests, investigates them, and issues compliance notices that give a landlord 14 days to correct a violation unless the notice sets another period. The text also adds city fines to section after section of the law, from $50 to $150 for a missing disclosure up to $500 to $2,000 for retaliation. Under FAIR, administration of the landlord-tenant law moves from the Department of Housing to the Department of Buildings, in a new Office of Rental Housing that mediates disputes when both sides agree to it, refers tenants and landlords to legal aid and housing counseling, and issues citations where the law sets a fine. Both offices are created “subject to appropriation,” which means each exists to the extent that a city budget pays for it.

Several things appear only in the mayor’s text. It opens with a Tenant Bill of Rights: ten rights, most of them pointing to protections spelled out elsewhere in the law. It gives a tenant who is displaced by code-compliance repairs the right to move back into the unit at the old rent and on the same lease terms, with no new deposit. It sets up an Eviction Counsel Program for tenants who have received an eviction notice and have incomes at or below 80 percent of the area median income: brief legal help for every qualifying tenant, and full representation where the legal-aid group finds a likely defense, an illegal lockout, a procedural failure by the landlord, or another material benefit to the tenant. That program is also subject to appropriation. The text bars lease clauses that stop a tenant from criticizing the landlord, and it counts internet service among the services a landlord must keep running when the lease includes it.

FAIR has additions of its own. It would bar any landlord other than a small owner-occupant from holding a habitable unit “deliberately vacant” for more than three months in order to manipulate market rents; the section itself states no penalty. It directs the Commissioner of Buildings to draft legislation for faster approval of conversions of offices and other non-residential buildings to housing and of new residential buildings with 40 or more units, and for permit help for owner-occupants of small buildings, with plans due to a Council committee within 180 days. It excuses a landlord from penalties for a loss of heat, water, gas or power that is beyond the landlord’s control and not caused by the landlord’s nonpayment or neglect. It also changes who can recover attorney fees in a case under the law, from the “prevailing plaintiff” to the “prevailing party.” Our reading of that one-word change: the side that is sued and wins, landlord or tenant, could also recover its court costs and attorney fees, which the current wording and the mayor’s text give only to a winning plaintiff.

The difference for buildings of six units or fewer where the owner lives

Today a building of six units or fewer where the owner lives is exempt from the landlord-tenant law except for two rules: the written notice a landlord must give before ending or not renewing a lease, and the ban on lockouts. Both texts keep that exemption and change the list of rules that still apply. The mayor’s list is the longer one: the Tenant Bill of Rights, the tenant’s own duties, the rules on a landlord’s entry, the deposit cap and the return of deposits, the fee limits, repair-and-deduct and rent withholding, the nonpayment and notice rules, the lockout ban, and the registry, with the registration payment waived. FAIR’s list has the landlord’s duty to maintain the unit, repair-and-deduct and rent withholding, the lockout ban, the registry, and a reference to a Section 5-12-135, which the next paragraph takes up.

FAIR’s text strikes the current reference to the notice rule, Section 5-12-130(j), from that list. Our reading: as written, the 30-, 60- and 120-day notice periods would no longer be among the rules applied to owner-occupied buildings of six units or fewer under FAIR. The text does not say whether that result is intended. FAIR also refers five times to a Section 5-12-135 and contains no section with that number. In the current code that number belongs to a notice pilot program for the area around Jackson Park, as the mayor’s June filing shows when it renumbers it. We report those references as they stand and draw no conclusion about what they are meant to reach.

How the differences fall on a renter, a small owner and a newcomer

A renter outside the small owner-occupied buildings gets the deposit cap, the higher lockout fines and the repair limits under either text, and loses deposit interest under either. The gap is at move-in, where the application fee tops out at $20 or $50 and a move-in fee is barred or allowed, and after a complaint, which goes to a housing bureau that investigates under the mayor’s text and to a buildings office that offers voluntary mediation or writes a citation under FAIR.

A renter or an owner in an owner-occupied building of two to six units is covered by more of the mayor’s text than of FAIR’s, as the lists in the section above show. Under the mayor’s text such an owner registers each rented unit every year and is exempt from the payment. Under FAIR the owner registers every two years, and the text states no registration payment.

Someone moving to Chicago would meet these rules at the first lease. Under either text the landlord hands over the unit’s registration confirmation at signing and discloses rent-setting software. The mayor’s text would take effect on January 1, 2027. Most of FAIR would take effect on July 1, 2027.

What the records settle and what they leave open

On the recordBoth substitutes were approved by their committees, on September 16 and September 17, and put off by the full Council on September 23. Source: the City Clerk’s two records.
On the recordNeither substitute contains a just-cause requirement or a relocation payment. The mayor’s June 29 filing contained both, in Sections 5-12-135 and 5-12-137, with a relocation payment in its general case of five months’ rent or $5,000, whichever is greater.
On the recordBoth substitutes cap security deposits, end deposit interest and raise the lockout fine. They differ on the application fee, move-in fees, the registry, the department in charge and the effective date.
Not establishedWhether either ordinance passes, and in what form. A substitute can be amended again before a vote.
Not establishedThe two committee tallies and the second delay on September 29. They are news reports; neither Clerk record posted a roll call or a later entry when we read it.
Not establishedWhat either new office would be funded at. Both are subject to appropriation.
Not establishedWhich fields of the mayor’s registry the public would see. The text leaves that to department rules.
Not establishedWhat FAIR’s references to Section 5-12-135 are meant to reach, and what FAIR’s original July filing said. That filing is posted as a scanned image, and we did not read it.

Where the records are

Both ordinances and their histories are on the City Clerk’s legislation site: SO2026-0026554 for the mayor’s ordinance (the 41-page substitute and the 49-page original) and SO2026-0027202 for FAIR (the 25-page substitute). In each file, words that are struck through would be deleted from the current code and words that are underscored would be added; text with neither mark is the code as it stands. Any later action by the Council appears on those two record pages.

A separate page covers South Shore, the area next to the Obama Presidential Center, and what the data and the law show there.

Known limits

This page reports what the two texts say and takes no position on either. It does not predict how a court or a city department would apply them, and it summarizes: each substitute runs to dozens of pages, and provisions that match the current code or make small wording changes are left out. Where a statement goes beyond the words of a text, it is marked as our reading. The comparison is of the substitutes as posted on September 30, 2026; an amendment on the Council floor would change it.

Sources The City Clerk’s records SO2026-0026554 and SO2026-0027202 (action history, sponsors and attachments, read from the Clerk’s public data service on September 30, 2026); the substitute ordinances attached to them, 41 and 25 pages, each read in full that day; the mayor’s original filing of June 29, 2026, 49 pages, read for the sections the substitute removed; and the city’s press release of the same date. The committee tallies come from Block Club Chicago’s report of September 17, 2026, and the second delay and the revenue estimate from The Real Deal’s report of September 29, 2026; each is attributed where it appears. The October 14 agenda and the call for the October 21 special meeting come from the Clerk’s meeting records, read October 19, 2026.
Reading An amending ordinance prints current law, deletions and additions in one text. We separated the three by testing every character against the strikethrough and underscore rules drawn on each page, then checked each statement on this page against the text that would be in force if the ordinance passed, the text it would delete, or the text it would add.
Counting The late-fee example is our arithmetic: a flat $10 plus 5 percent of the rent above $500 under the current code and above $1,000 under either text, worked for a rent of $1,500. No other figure on this page is computed.

Compiled by KCM Desk from the City Clerk’s records and the two substitute ordinances, read September 30, 2026. First published July 17, 2026; rebuilt from the texts on September 30, 2026; the records and the Council’s meetings checked again October 19, 2026. Human-guided and edited — about this desk. If you spot an error, corrections come first.