Can you still charge a tenant for cleaning in California?

Short answer: sometimes, but not as a matter of routine, and not because the lease says so. This is the part of AB 2801 that changes what you can charge rather than how you document it, and it is the part most likely to be sitting in a lease template that has not been looked at since 2023.

What the statute says

Since January 1, 2025, a landlord cannot require a tenant to pay for — or assert a claim against the tenant or the security deposit for — professional carpet cleaning or other professional cleaning services, unless it is reasonably necessary to return the premises to the condition it was in at the inception of the tenancy, exclusive of ordinary wear and tear.

Read that carefully, because the operative words are *reasonably necessary* and *the condition it was in at the inception*. The benchmark is not "clean". It is not "how I would like it to look for the next showing". It is the state the unit was actually in on the day this particular tenant moved in.

Ordinary wear and tear, which has not changed

The wear-and-tear carve-out is long-standing California law and it does a lot of work here. Traffic patterns worn into a carpet over a four-year tenancy are wear. A carpet with paint spilled on it is not. Faded paint is wear; crayon on a wall is not. Dust on a blind is wear; grease baked onto a range hood generally is not.

The longer the tenancy, the more of the unit's condition is attributable to time rather than to the tenant — which is why a deduction that would be reasonable after eight months can be hard to sustain after six years.

Why this makes the move-in photos matter so much

If the standard is "the condition at the inception of the tenancy", then a deduction is only as good as your record of what that condition was. Without one, you are asserting a baseline from memory against a tenant asserting a different one.

That is the quiet logic connecting the two halves of AB 2801: the same statute that narrowed the standard also started requiring the photographs that establish it. For tenancies beginning on or after July 1, 2025, those move-in photos are themselves required — see move-in photos and your next tenancy.

What a defensible cleaning deduction tends to look like

• It is tied to a specific condition, not to the fact that a tenancy ended.
• There is a before photo showing that condition when the unit came back.
• There is an after photo showing the work that the charge paid for.
• There is an invoice or receipt for the actual amount, not an estimate or a round number.
• The amount is proportionate to returning the unit to its starting condition — not to upgrading it.

All of that has to reach the tenant inside 21 days, packaged with the itemized statement. We cover that packet in the 21-day letter.

The awkward part, said plainly

We are a cleaning company. It would suit us commercially if every landlord in California kept billing tenants for a professional clean on every turnover. That is not what the statute allows, and pretending otherwise would not serve you.

What has genuinely changed is who the clean is *for*. A turnover clean is now mostly a cost of getting your unit re-rented quickly rather than a line item to pass along — which makes it a question of price and turnaround time, not of deposit paperwork. If that is the position you are in, we do move-in and move-out cleans across the Bay Area at a price you see up front.