Tenant Information in San Francisco: Collection, Sharing and Retention

The natural assumption is that a rule with "San Francisco" in its name applies broadly across the city, while a statewide rule sounds generic and easy to overlook. Here, that assumption runs backward. San Francisco's Fair Chance Ordinance housing provisions are specifically scoped to covered affordable and subsidized housing, they don't automatically apply to a standard market-rate rental. Meanwhile, AB-1418, a statewide law that doesn't mention San Francisco at all, is the one that actually governs every California landlord's use of criminal history in a rental decision.

A landlord who builds a screening policy assuming the Fair Chance Ordinance covers their market-rate unit is applying the wrong framework, while a landlord who's never heard of AB-1418 is missing the one that actually binds them. Sorting this out first is the actual first step, before getting into what either system requires.

Within its actual scope, covered affordable housing, the Fair Chance Ordinance sets specific procedural requirements. Housing providers can't ask about criminal history on the application form itself, and a criminal history check can only happen after the provider has already determined the applicant meets every other qualification. Applicants must receive a copy of their rights before any background check runs.

Certain categories can't be considered at all: arrests that didn't lead to conviction, expunged or sealed records, juvenile records, infractions, participation in a diversion program, and convictions older than seven years. Only convictions directly related to the housing decision warrant individualized consideration. An August 2026 amendment, Ordinance 128-26, added a further protection specific to this covered housing: providers can no longer consider an out-of-state arrest or conviction tied to conduct that's lawful in California, abortion-related healthcare, gender-affirming care, drag performance, or miscarriage-related conduct among the examples. If an applicant is denied based on criminal history, they get 14 days to respond with evidence of rehabilitation, corrections to inaccurate information, or mitigating context.

This is the rule most likely to be missed precisely because it doesn't carry a local name. Effective January 1, 2024, AB-1418 eliminated Crime-Free Multi-Housing Program-style policies statewide and prohibits using criminal history alone as grounds for denying an application or evicting a tenant. It also bars local governments from penalizing a landlord for choosing not to screen or evict on a criminal-history basis, effectively overriding any municipal program that had required that kind of screening.

It's worth being precise about what this law doesn't do: it doesn't prohibit a landlord from running a criminal background check at all; it removes any requirement to run one and removes criminal history alone as sufficient grounds for a denial or eviction decision. That's a meaningfully different scope than a rule banning background checks outright.

Separate from AB-1418, California's Civil Rights Department treats a blanket criminal-history exclusion policy as a potential fair housing violation under a disparate-impact theory, meaning intent to discriminate isn't required for a policy to be unlawful if it has an unjustified discriminatory effect. The reasoning is specific: criminal justice system involvement disproportionately affects certain protected groups, so a blanket screening criterion can produce a discriminatory effect even without discriminatory intent behind it.

What's actually permitted is narrower than a blanket policy: a conviction has to be directly related to the housing decision, meaning it has a specific and direct bearing on a legitimate interest like resident or property safety, and even then, timing, accuracy, and mitigating circumstances need genuine consideration rather than an automatic disqualification.

Civil Code § 1950.6 caps the application screening fee at $30 per applicant statewide, a figure adjusted annually for inflation since 1998. The fee can only cover actual out-of-pocket costs, the expense of a tenant screening or credit reporting service, and the reasonable value of time spent gathering the information, not a flat markup. Landlords have to provide an itemized receipt showing those out-of-pocket expenses and time.

Where a credit report is part of the process, the applicant is entitled to a copy of that report within seven days of the landlord obtaining it. I didn't find a separate San Francisco-specific fee cap or consumer-report rule beyond these statewide requirements, worth noting directly rather than implying a city-specific figure exists where one doesn't.

Neither California's statewide framework nor San Francisco's own rules set a specific numeric retention period for tenant screening records. The general principle, consistent with how this series treats retention elsewhere, is to keep information only as long as there's a genuine legal or business reason to hold it; application materials and screening reports for declined or since-ended tenancies are destroyed once that reason no longer exists, rather than accumulated indefinitely.