How Much Notice Do You Have to Give to Raise the Rent in Florida?

A lease is up in two months and you want more rent. The number you'll hear from almost anyone in this business is 60 days' notice, and that's good advice. It's what we do, it's what most Tampa Bay managers do, and it's more than Florida law asks for. A tenant who gets two months to plan is a tenant who responds instead of reacting.

Where the 60-day rent increase notice comes from

Section 83.575, Florida Statutes says a rental agreement for a specified duration may not require less than 30 days' notice or more than 60 days' notice, from either the tenant or the landlord, that the agreement won't be renewed.

Read that carefully, because it does two things people miss. It's about ending a tenancy, not about changing the rent. And it's a ceiling on what a lease may demand, not a requirement that anyone give notice at all. A lease can ask for 30 days or 60, and it can't ask for 90.

The professional habit of giving 60 days before a rent change grew out of that section and out of plain courtesy, and it's a good habit. Giving a tenant two months is the right way to run this. Just know that when you give it, you're meeting a standard rather than satisfying a statute.

Where it stops being optional: if your lease contains a non-renewal notice clause, that clause binds you. Read your own lease before you count days, because yours is the document that governs.

Inside a fixed term, the rent is set

A written lease for a fixed term sets the rent for that term. You can't raise it in month seven of a twelve-month lease because you'd like to, unless the lease itself provides for it, and most don't.

When the term ends, the lease ends. Whatever you offer next is a new agreement that the tenant can take or leave. That's the moment the rent can change, and the notice question is about how much warning you give before it arrives.

Raising rent on a month-to-month tenant

If your tenant is on a month-to-month arrangement rather than a term, there's no end date to wait for. Changing the rent means ending the current arrangement and offering a new one, and that's where the statute does set a floor.

Section 83.57 covers ending a tenancy without a specific duration. Written notice, and the periods are:

• Year to year: not less than 60 days before the end of the annual period
• Quarter to quarter: 30 days before the end of the quarterly period
• Month to month: 30 days before the end of the monthly period
• Week to week: 7 days before the end of the weekly period

Thirty days is the floor for a month-to-month tenant. Sixty is still the better practice, and nothing stops you from giving it.

If you have read that the notice is 15 days, that was the rule until 2023. House Bill 1417 raised it to 30 effective 1 July that year, and the old figure is still repeated on a lot of sites.

How much can a landlord raise rent in Florida?

Section 125.0103 bars a county, municipality, or other local entity from adopting or maintaining any measure that has the effect of imposing controls on rents. Florida has no rent control and local governments can't create it.

You'll see a "30 percent cap" quoted online. That came from a proposed bill that never became law, and there's no such limit in Florida. An owner who believes it will under-ask, which is the only reason this is worth correcting.

Local rules can't add a notice requirement either. Section 83.425, passed in 2023, preempts regulation of residential tenancies to the state and names notice requirements among the matters it supersedes. If you remember a county ordinance on this, that's what you're remembering, and it hasn't applied since 2023.

What the Tampa Bay market will carry

Apartments are soft. Tampa's rental vacancy rate reached 10.7 percent in March 2026, the highest since that measure began in 2000. Apartment asking rents in Tampa are running about 2 to 3 percent below a year ago, with the average near $1,900. More than a third of Tampa apartment communities are advertising concessions: a free month, waived fees, reduced deposits.

Houses are holding better. The median single-family rent in the Tampa area is near $2,500, and single-family supply hasn't grown the way apartment supply has. Nobody built ten thousand new three-bedroom houses with yards.

Your house isn't competing with the apartment index, and a tenant comparing your renewal against an apartment special is comparing two different things. Our guide to how rent gets priced covers what sets your number.

Your tenant also can't easily leave to buy. Zillow put the typical US renter's monthly cost about $1,066 below a new buyer's in August 2026, $1,948 against $3,014, with Tampa's gap near $1,100. A tenant who would have bought a house two years ago is running that math now and staying where they are. Gold Palm Homes covers what rising rates changed for buyers and sellers in more detail.

So your tenant has more options than they did in 2022 if they're willing to move into an apartment, and fewer if they wanted to buy a house.

How to handle the renewal

Send it 60 days out, in writing. The amount, the date it takes effect, and the new end date. Sixty days is the standard even when no clause requires it, and it gives a tenant who intends to stay time to arrange it.

Price against houses, not against the rent index. The index is mostly apartments. Pull three to five comparable houses that leased in the last 90 days, not ones sitting on the market at a price nobody has paid.

Work out what a vacancy costs before deciding how hard to push. A month empty on a $2,500 house is $2,500 gone, plus the make-ready and the days it sits. A $75 increase earns $900 over a year, so one empty month wipes out nearly three years of it. What an empty house costs you every month covers the rest.

Decide what you'd accept before you send it. If the tenant counters at half, is that a yes? Knowing the answer in advance keeps you from negotiating against yourself in an email.

Treat a good tenant as worth money. Someone who pays on time and reports a leak before it becomes a floor is worth more than the last $50 a month. That's arithmetic rather than sentiment: turnover costs you vacancy, make-ready and leasing time, and a tenant who stays costs you none of them.

If this is new to you, the accidental landlord's first month covers the rest of the setup, and managing a rental from out of state covers what changes when you're not nearby.