California: Photos required to support deposit deductions

It's easy to treat this as one photo rule with one effective date. It isn't. The statute creates two separate obligations that started on different dates and cover different moments in a tenancy. [Cite: AB 2801, Chapter 280, Statutes of 2024, Sec. 2]

Starting April 1, 2025, a landlord who intends to deduct from a deposit for repairs or cleaning has to photograph the unit within a reasonable time after regaining possession, before that repair or cleaning begins, and then photograph it again within a reasonable time after the work is done. That's the move-out and post-repair pairing, and it applies regardless of when the tenancy itself started.

Starting with tenancies that begin on or after July 1, 2025, a separate requirement kicks in: photographing the unit immediately before, or at the very start of, the tenancy. This is the move-in baseline, and it only applies going forward to new tenancies, not to one already underway when July 1 arrived.

The statute's language is specific: photographs. Some secondary guidance floating around treats video as an acceptable substitute, but that's not what the text actually requires, and relying on video alone as the sole documentation leaves a landlord exposed if a deduction is ever challenged. [Cite: Cal. Civ. Code § 1950.5, as amended by AB 2801]

A landlord who wants extra documentation can still shoot video on top of the required photographs. The point is that photographs aren't optional or interchangeable with some other form of visual record; they're the specific evidence the statute contemplates.

Section 1950.5 already required a landlord to return a deposit, or provide an itemized statement of deductions, within 21 days of the tenant vacating. That deadline isn't new. What's new is that the itemized statement now has to be backed by the photographs this law requires, not just a written description of what was deducted and why.

That connection is what makes the photo requirement more than a paperwork add-on. A landlord who misses a phase's photo requirement doesn't just have a documentation gap; they have a weaker position if a tenant disputes the deduction, since the existing bad-faith retention penalties under this same section were built around a landlord being able to substantiate what they claim to have deducted for.

AB 2801 didn't create the security deposit statute; it's the second amendment to it in as many years. AB 12, effective July 1, 2024, already rewrote Civil Code § 1950.5 to cap most residential security deposits at one month's rent, with a narrow exception for small landlords. AB 2801 builds on that same, recently rewritten section rather than starting from scratch. [Cite: AB 12, Chapter 733, Statutes of 2023]

That matters practically because a landlord who only updated deposit-collection practices for AB 12 in 2024 and hasn't revisited the statute since may have missed that the same section picked up a second, entirely different obligation the following year.

Given the two separate phase dates, the practical fix is treating photo documentation as a fixed step at three points rather than something to remember only when a deduction is planned: move-in (for tenancies from July 1, 2025 onward), the moment possession is regained at move-out, and again once any repair or cleaning covered by a deduction is complete. Missing any one of the three leaves a gap in the evidence chain the statute is built around.