Max Occupancy Limits by State: How Many People Per Bedroom?

Under the most widely used guideline, a 1-bedroom apartment can hold two people and a 2-bedroom can hold four. That is HUD’s two-persons-per-bedroom standard, and it is the number most landlords work from.

It is also not a law, and in several states it is not the number that governs:

• Texas caps you at three adults per bedroom by statute.
• Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Delaware and Washington DC do not count bedrooms at all. They set minimum square feet per occupant.
• Most states have no statewide rule and leave it to your city.

How many people can live in each apartment size?

Under the two-per-bedroom guideline, multiply bedrooms by two. A 1-bedroom holds two people, a 2-bedroom holds four, a 3-bedroom holds six.

These are guideline figures, not legal maximums. Your state or city may set a different number, and several do.

What does the “2 + 1” rule mean?

“2 + 1” means two people per bedroom plus one additional person for the unit as a whole. On that basis a 2-bedroom holds five people rather than four.

Some fair housing agencies use it as their working threshold, and California’s is the best known. It is an enforcement heuristic rather than a statute, so it gives you a defensible position rather than a legal entitlement.

How do occupancy limits work for a studio apartment?

A studio has no separate bedroom, so the two-per-bedroom guideline gives you no answer at all. Most landlords treat a studio as a two-person unit.

Where your state sets minimum square feet per occupant, use that figure instead, because it works on floor area and does not need a bedroom count. In Massachusetts, for example, a studio needs 150 sq ft of habitable floor space for the first occupant and 100 sq ft for a second. Where your state has no rule, fall back to your local housing code.

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What does the Fair Housing Act say about occupancy?

The Fair Housing Act is a statute. Congress passed it in 1968 and amended it in 1988 to add familial status, meaning the presence of children under 18, as a protected class. That is what makes it unlawful to turn away an applicant because they have children.

The Act also contains the provision that lets you set an occupancy limit at all. It says nothing in the Act “limits the applicability of any reasonable local, State or Federal restrictions regarding the maximum number of occupants permitted to occupy a dwelling” (42 U.S.C. § 3607(b)(1)).

Your authority to cap occupancy comes from there, and the operative word is reasonable.

What is the Keating Memo, and is it law?

The Keating Memo is HUD guidance. It is not law and not a court ruling. In 1991 HUD’s General Counsel Frank Keating wrote to HUD’s Regional Counsel, the agency’s own lawyers, telling them how to evaluate occupancy complaints. HUD published it in the Federal Register in 1998 as a formal statement of policy.

What it says, verbatim: “the Department believes that an occupancy policy of two persons in a bedroom, as a general rule, is reasonable under the Fair Housing Act.” That is where the two-per-bedroom number comes from.

The memo immediately qualifies it: “the reasonableness of any occupancy policy is rebuttable.” It is also explicit that it “was not intended to establish occupancy policies or requirements for any particular type of housing.”

So the Keating Memo does not tell you what your policy must be. It tells HUD’s investigators what to look at when someone complains about yours.

What factors does HUD actually consider?

HUD weighs the physical realities of the unit against the policy the landlord applied. The memo lists these factors:

• The size and number of bedrooms. A family of five refused a two-bedroom with two large bedrooms and spacious living areas is a very different case from the same family refused a two-bedroom mobile home space.
• The configuration of the unit. The memo’s own example: two condo associations both apply a two-per-bedroom rule to a family of five. One building’s unit has two bedrooms plus a den, the other’s does not. A charge might be warranted against the first and not the second.
• Other physical limitations, naming “the capacity of the septic, sewer, or other building systems.”
• State and local law. Where a state or local occupancy requirement exists and your policy reflects it, HUD treats that as a factor indicating your policy is reasonable.
• Other circumstances. The memo singles out a development previously marketed as “adults only” as pointing toward a charge, especially alongside other evidence that the occupancy policy is a pretext.

Two lines from the memo are worth knowing by heart, because they are the ones landlords most often fall foul of:

• ‍“An occupancy policy which limits the number of children per unit is less likely to be reasonable than one which limits the number of people per unit.”
• “Special circumstances also may be found where the housing provider limits the total number of dwellings he or she is willing to rent to families with children.”

The second one has teeth. The memo’s worked example: a landlord with thirty two-bedroom units adopts a reasonable four-person-per-unit policy, then refuses a family of two adults and two children because twenty of the thirty units are already occupied by families with children. HUD would recommend a reasonable cause finding.

A per-unit policy that is fine on paper becomes a violation in how it is applied.

Is the International Property Maintenance Code binding?

Not by itself. The International Property Maintenance Code is a model code written by the International Code Council, a private standards body. It has no force anywhere until a state or city adopts it, editions differ, and adopting jurisdictions amend it.

Where it is in force, IPMC § 404 sets these minimum areas:

In short, a bedroom needs 70 sq ft for one occupant and 50 sq ft per person once shared, and a dining room carries no minimum until three people live in the unit. “Non-habitable” is a code term and it is counter-intuitive: it means rooms not intended for living or sleeping in, such as kitchens, bathrooms, hallways and closets. A perfectly functional kitchen is a non-habitable room.

Check whether your jurisdiction has adopted the IPMC, and which edition, before relying on these figures. Several states have adopted it, more have made it optional, and a good number have not adopted it at all.

What are the occupancy limits in your state?

This is where the answer actually lives. States fall into four situations, and which one you are in changes what you can write into a lease.

Which states set a numeric occupancy rule?

Twelve jurisdictions set a figure in statute or regulation. Read the “what it is” column carefully, because a cap and a presumption are not the same thing.

Three distinctions matter here. Texas is a ceiling you cannot exceed. Missouri and Virginia are presumptions that protect a policy you choose to adopt, so they are not caps. The square-footage states do not count bedrooms at all, and converting their figures into a bedroom count would be inventing a number. Our state guides to landlord-tenant laws cover the wider rules in each state.

Which states publish occupancy guidance instead of a rule?

Three states have no binding statewide rule, but their fair housing agency publishes a threshold it works to. Guidance is not law, though an agency investigating a complaint against you will apply it.

• Georgia - The Commission on Equal Opportunity restates HUD’s two-per-bedroom standard for average-sized bedrooms, and warns that overly restrictive occupancy standards disproportionately affect families with children. Georgia treats the IPMC as a permissive code that applies only where a local government adopts it.
• South Carolina - The Human Affairs Commission restates the Keating standard, subject to bedroom size, the ages of children and local ordinances. The IPMC is likewise permissive.
• Iowa - The Civil Rights Commission’s guidance is that landlords may not set standards stricter than the local housing code, and where a city has none, two people per average-sized bedroom. It states the standard is based on “person”, not on whether the person is an adult or a child. These documents date from 2001 and 2008, so treat them as agency guidance of that vintage rather than current law.

Which states limit what your city can do?

Three states have restricted local governments’ power to cap occupancy by relationship. If your city still has a “no more than N unrelated persons” rule on the books, check whether it survives.

• Washington - A city may not regulate or limit the number of unrelated persons occupying a dwelling. Building-code occupant-load limits, group-living rules and short-term-rental rules are preserved. RCW 35A.21.314 and parallel provisions.
• Oregon - No local government may set or enforce a maximum occupancy limit for a residential dwelling based on the familial or nonfamilial relationships among occupants. ORS 90.112, effective 1 January 2022.
• Colorado - A local government may not limit how many people may live together based on familial relationship. Local limits survive only where based on demonstrated health and safety standards such as building code, fire code or wastewater standards. C.R.S. § 29-20-111, effective 1 July 2024.

Which states have no statewide occupancy rule?

Thirty-six states. In these, occupancy is set by local ordinance plus the federal Fair Housing Act baseline, so there is no state number to look up:

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Add Hawaii, Minnesota, New Mexico, Indiana, Oregon and Washington, which have a statewide rule on room size only.

Washington, Oregon and Colorado appear here as well as in the section above. They limit what your city may do, but they set no occupancy figure of their own.

Does a statewide building code set an occupancy limit?

No, and this is the distinction most worth holding on to. Several of the states above have a statewide building code carrying a minimum room area, usually 70 sq ft for a habitable room, from the International Residential Code.

That is a construction standard, not an occupancy cap. It tells a builder how big to build a room. It does not tell you how many people may sleep in it.

Presenting a room-size minimum as an occupancy limit is the error most likely to produce the discrimination claim you are trying to avoid.

Two live dates to watch. In South Dakota, the International Building Code becomes the default standard in areas without a local code from 1 July 2026. In Hawaii, a September 2025 emergency proclamation has suspended the deadline for counties to adopt the state building code.

How do you set an occupancy policy that holds up?

The test is not whether your number is right. It is whether your policy is reasonable, written down, and applied the same way to everyone.

• Count people, not children - this is the single most important line in the Keating Memo. A policy of “four people per unit” is defensible. A policy of “two children maximum” is not, and neither is a rule that counts children differently from adults.
• Start from your state, then your city, then the federal guideline - if you are in Texas, your ceiling is statutory. If you are in Massachusetts, your rule is square footage. Only where neither applies does two-per-bedroom become your working number.
• Write the number down before you need it - a limit set after an application arrives looks like what it probably is. Put an occupancy clause in every lease stating the permitted number of occupants and how a tenant requests to add one.
• Apply the same limit to identical units, every time - the Keating example is the warning. A fair policy applied selectively, because a certain share of your units already house families, is still a violation. Treat every applicant the same way.
• Let the unit’s physical limits do the work - a two-bedroom with a den and large bedrooms can reasonably hold more people than a small two-bedroom, and septic or sewer capacity is named in the Keating Memo as a constraint a landlord may rely on. Physical justifications are the ones that survive scrutiny, so document them.
• Be careful with 55+ housing - communities that qualify for the Housing for Older Persons Act exemption can lawfully exclude children, but qualifying has conditions: at least 80% of units occupied by someone 55 or over, published policies demonstrating intent, and age verification. Marketing a building to older residents does not by itself create the exemption.

What can you do if a tenant exceeds the occupancy limit?

Start with the lease. If you have an occupancy clause stating the permitted number and the process for adding an occupant, an extra long-term resident is a lease violation you can act on.

What you can do about it is state law, not federal, and it varies considerably. Notice periods, whether the tenant gets a chance to cure, and the grounds on which you can proceed are all set by your state’s landlord-tenant statute. Check yours before serving anything.

Which situations are not lease violations?

Two, and both catch landlords out.

A child born or adopted into the household during the tenancy is protected. Missouri writes this into its statute explicitly, and familial status protection under the Fair Housing Act reaches it everywhere.

In New York, Real Property Law § 235-f gives a tenant the right to have immediate family plus one additional occupant and that occupant’s dependent children, regardless of what a no-roommate clause says.

How do you keep your occupancy policy consistent across a portfolio?

The part of this that goes wrong is rarely the number. It is that the occupancy clause is in one lease and not another, or a limit gets applied to one applicant and waived for the next, and two years later nobody can show which policy was in force when.

Landlord Studio stores your lease documents against each property, so the occupancy clause you wrote is attached to the tenancy it governs and you can produce it when asked. If you are managing several units, that consistency is the thing a fair housing complaint turns on.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Can 4 people live in a 1-bedroom apartment?

Under the two-per-bedroom guideline, no. In practice it depends on the unit’s square footage and your local code. A large one-bedroom in a state with no occupancy rule may well accommodate four legally, while the same household in a small unit would breach a square-footage standard. What you cannot do is apply a stricter limit to a household because it includes children.

Can a landlord limit the number of occupants?

Yes. The Fair Housing Act expressly preserves “reasonable local, State or Federal restrictions regarding the maximum number of occupants permitted to occupy a dwelling”. The limit has to be reasonable, and it has to be applied consistently.

Can landlords limit the number of children in a property?

No. Familial status is a protected class, and HUD’s own guidance says a policy limiting children per unit is less likely to be reasonable than one limiting people per unit. Set your limit on total occupants.

Can landlords set a one-person-per-bedroom policy?

It is hard to defend. One per bedroom is more restrictive than the two-per-bedroom standard HUD treats as generally reasonable, so it invites the question of whether the real purpose is to screen out families. If you have a genuine physical reason, such as a very small unit or a septic constraint, document it.

Does a newborn count toward the occupancy limit?

In Missouri, no, because the statute exempts a child born to the tenants during the lease. Elsewhere there is no blanket exemption in statute, but enforcing an occupancy limit against a family because a baby arrived sits close to the center of what familial status protection exists to prevent. Treat it as a situation to accommodate, not a violation to act on.