Evanston Lease Non-Renewal Notice Law: 90 Days Required

Evanston's RLTO now requires a landlord to provide written notice at least 90 days before the end of a lease term if the landlord doesn't intend to renew, and the same 90-day minimum applies to terminating a month-to-month tenancy.

[Cite: Evanston City Code, Title 5, Chapter 3, as amended July 22, 2024]

Contemporaneous local reporting on the City Council vote confirms this was an increase from a prior 30-day requirement, meaning the notice period essentially tripled under the amendment.

[Cite: Daily Northwestern, coverage of the July 22, 2024 City Council RLTO amendment]

The requirement isn't limited to sending a notice. For a lease renewal specifically, the landlord also has to provide the actual new lease document within that same 90-day window before the current term ends.

[Cite: Evanston City Code, Title 5, Chapter 3, as amended July 22, 2024]

A tenant isn't obligated to respond to a renewal offer any sooner than 45 days before the lease expires, which gives the tenant meaningful time to review the new terms rather than facing pressure to decide immediately upon receiving the notice.

[Cite: Evanston City Code, Title 5, Chapter 3, as amended July 22, 2024]

This is the detail with the most direct financial and operational impact. If a landlord fails to comply with the 90-day notice and new-lease-document requirement, the tenant automatically receives a 90-day extension of the existing lease.

[Cite: Evanston City Code, Title 5, Chapter 3, as amended July 22, 2024]

That's not a penalty a tenant has to sue to obtain. It functions automatically based on the landlord's own noncompliance, which means a landlord who misses this deadline by even a few days can find themselves bound to the tenant for three additional months on the existing lease terms.

Security deposits in Evanston are capped at 1.5 times the monthly rent.

[Cite: Evanston City Code, Title 5, Chapter 3, as amended July 22, 2024]

Secondary reporting on the amendment describes the prior cap as having been higher, though the specific prior figure wasn't consistently reported across the sources reviewed for this article. What's clear is that this amendment tightened the ceiling, not loosened it.

[Cite: independent compliance analyses of the July 2024 RLTO amendment]

Where a deposit exceeds one month's rent, the ordinance allows the tenant to pay that excess amount in installments during the first six months of the tenancy, rather than requiring the full 1.5-month deposit upfront in a single payment.

[Cite: Evanston City Code, Title 5, Chapter 3, as amended July 22, 2024]

For a landlord collecting the maximum permitted deposit, that installment structure changes cash-flow expectations at move-in, since the full deposit amount may not actually be in hand until months into the lease.

Deposits have to be returned within 21 days after the tenant vacates, along with a written, itemized statement of any deductions for unpaid rent or damage beyond normal wear and tear.

[Cite: Evanston City Code, Title 5, Chapter 3, as amended July 22, 2024]

A landlord who fails to return the deposit properly, or return it at all, within that window exposes themselves to a tenant claim for double the amount owed.

[Cite: independent compliance analyses of the Evanston RLTO]

Beyond the cap and the return deadline, Evanston's ordinance requires deposits to be held in a federally insured interest-bearing account, with the accrued interest paid to the tenant annually.

[Cite: independent compliance analyses of the Evanston RLTO deposit provisions]

That's a recurring obligation, not a one-time task handled at move-in. A landlord holding deposits across a portfolio of Evanston units needs an annual process for calculating and paying out that interest, separate from the deposit-return process that only happens at the end of a tenancy. A landlord who sets up compliant deposit handling once at lease signing and never revisits it risks missing this annual payment entirely.

Evanston landlords are also required to attach a summary of the RLTO itself to every lease.

[Cite: independent compliance analyses of the Evanston RLTO disclosure requirements]

Pairing that disclosure requirement with the notice-period and deposit-cap compliance work covered above makes sense operationally, since all three touch the same lease-signing and renewal process. A property manager updating lease templates for the 90-day notice language and the 1.5-month deposit cap has a natural opportunity to confirm the current RLTO summary is attached as well, rather than treating it as a separate compliance project.

The RLTO sits at Title 5, Chapter 3 of the Evanston City Code. The amendments discussed in this article were approved by City Council on July 22, 2024, and took effect January 1, 2025.

[Cite: City of Evanston, Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance summary]

That's the same citation the city itself uses for the ordinance, which is worth confirming directly since Evanston's RLTO gets amended periodically and a landlord relying on an older printed summary could be working from an outdated version of the notice or deposit rules.

The city's own published materials state that all rentals in Evanston are covered by the RLTO except for a specific list of categories: dormitories, fraternity and sorority houses, religious facilities, medical, geriatric, or counseling facilities, short-term hotel or motel stays, owner-occupied co-ops, and lease-to-own agreements.

[Cite: City of Evanston, Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance summary]

This is worth addressing directly rather than glossing over. Some secondary coverage of Evanston's ordinance suggests that owner-occupied buildings with six or fewer units may be exempt in certain circumstances, similar to how Chicago's separate ordinance treats small owner-occupied buildings. That claim couldn't be confirmed against the city's own published exemption list, which doesn't include a small-building or owner-occupied carve-out among its stated categories.

[Cite: City of Evanston, Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance summary; secondary compliance sources describing a possible small-building exemption]

A landlord who owns and lives in a small Evanston building and is considering relying on such an exemption shouldn't assume it applies based on secondary summaries alone. Confirming directly with the city or a local attorney, given the conflict between the city's own list and some secondary reporting, is the safer path before treating a property as exempt.

The practical starting point is auditing lease-renewal and non-renewal timelines against the new 90-day requirement, building in enough lead time that both the notice and, for renewals, the actual new lease document go out well before that deadline, given that missing it triggers an automatic extension rather than just a compliance gap to fix later.

Reviewing current deposit collection practices against the 1.5-month cap, and building the six-month installment option into lease paperwork for any deposit that exceeds one month's rent, closes the second major change this amendment made. For any owner-occupied small building, confirming coverage status directly with the city rather than relying on assumptions carried over from other Illinois ordinances avoids a costly misunderstanding.