New Jersey Became the Fourth State to Ban Algorithmic Rent Pricing

The law

Governor Mikie Sherrill signed the Forbidding the Algorithmic Inflation of Rent Act in Newark on July 20, 2026, enacting it as P.L. 2026, c.43.

The statute bars landlords and property managers from using algorithmic pricing software that pools nonpublic, competitively sensitive rent and occupancy data across competing landlords. It takes effect July 1, 2027, giving operators roughly a year to audit and remove noncompliant software.

New Jersey is the fourth state to enact such a ban, after New York, California and Connecticut. The underlying Assembly bill, A3497, was adopted by committee on June 8, 2026, with a committee substitute reported June 23.

What is actually prohibited

The target is not software that recommends rents. It is software that does so by ingesting nonpublic data from competing landlords and returning pricing guidance derived from it.

The theory of harm is that when many competitors in one market feed private occupancy and rent data into a shared system and follow its output, the result can approximate coordinated pricing without any landlord speaking to another. A landlord using public listing data, or its own portfolio history, is doing something the statute treats differently.

The release attributes to Attorney General Jennifer Davenport a reference to ongoing litigation over algorithmic rent collusion, indicating the state views the practice as raising antitrust questions independent of the new statute.

The findings behind the bill

The legislative findings cite median three-bedroom rents rising 35% statewide between 2021 and 2024, and Hoboken studio rents rising 61% over the same period. They also state that more than half of New Jersey renters are rent burdened, citing Census Bureau data.

Analysis: those figures establish that rents rose sharply; they do not by themselves establish how much of the increase was attributable to pricing software rather than to supply shortage, migration, interest rates or construction costs. The findings are the legislature's stated rationale, and the causal share remains contested — which is why the effective-date gap is worth watching. A year from now there will be a before-and-after in a large rental market.

The pattern of adoption

The statewide bans followed local ones. Ordinances began in San Francisco and Philadelphia and spread to Jersey City, which passed its measure in May 2025, along with Minneapolis, San Diego and Hoboken.

That sequence — cities first, states after — is common in rental regulation, and it means large operators have increasingly been managing patchwork compliance across jurisdictions rather than a single national approach.

The federal litigation running alongside the state law

New Jersey's ban does not exist in isolation. The Justice Department's Antitrust Division sued RealPage in August 2024, amending its complaint in January 2025, alleging the company's revenue-management software relied on nonpublic, competitively sensitive rent and occupancy data shared by competing landlords, and included features that limited price decreases. RealPage agreed to a proposed consent judgment, filed November 24, 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, requiring it to stop using competitors' nonpublic data in its software's runtime pricing and to stop using active-lease data from other landlords.

The same case has produced settlements with landlords who used RealPage's software: Cortland Management, Greystar Management Services, LivCor and Willow Bridge Property Company, and, most recently, Pinnacle Property Management Services, whose proposed consent decree the department filed September 4, 2026. Each bars the landlord from algorithmic coordination and from exchanging competitively sensitive data with competitors and requires an antitrust compliance program.

That federal litigation targets specific software and specific companies through antitrust law; New Jersey's FAIR Act instead imposes a blanket prohibition on the underlying practice for any landlord operating in the state, regardless of which vendor's software is involved.