Portland Landlord Rules vs Clackamas County Rentals

The short answer: On Portland landlord rules vs Clackamas County, the dividing line is Portland city limits. Inside them, Portland City Code Title 30 adds mandatory relocation assistance, FAIR tenant screening standards, a security deposit cap, and a $70 per unit annual rental registration. Outside them, in Clackamas County, none of those apply. Oregon's statewide rent cap applies on both sides.

Portland Landlord Rules vs Clackamas County Rules Turn on City Limits

The operative question is not which county a property sits in. It is whether the address is inside the City of Portland. Portland's tenant protections live in Portland City Code Title 30, and the parallel registration statute at PCC 7.02.890 is written to reach a residential rental unit "in the City." That phrasing is the whole ballgame.

Two seams make this genuinely confusing in my part of the metro, and both cut in directions people do not expect.

First, a small piece of the City of Portland sits inside Clackamas County, in the area around SE Flavel north of SE Johnson Creek Boulevard. A property there is in Clackamas County and still bound by every Portland ordinance on this page. Being in the county buys you nothing.

Second, and far more common, large stretches of unincorporated Clackamas County carry "Portland, OR" mailing addresses. Those properties are not in the city and Title 30 does not reach them, no matter what the postal address says.

Because of both seams, verify a specific address against the city's own jurisdiction lookup rather than against a ZIP code or a listing header. This page describes local ordinance and Oregon statute for planning purposes and is not legal advice. Before you rely on a determination for a real property, put it to an Oregon landlord-tenant attorney.

What Portland Landlord Rules Add That Clackamas County Does Not

The heaviest item is mandatory relocation assistance under PCC 30.01.085. It is a payment the landlord owes the tenant, and it is triggered by four things: a no-cause termination, a termination for a qualifying landlord reason, declining to renew a tenancy on substantially the same terms, and a rent increase of 10% or more in a rolling 12-month period. Ninety days notice is required.

That fourth trigger is the one investors miss. A rent increase, on its own, with no termination involved, can create an obligation to write the tenant a check. The amount depends on unit size.

The enforcement side is not gentle either. A violation exposes the landlord to up to three times the monthly rent plus actual damages, the relocation assistance itself, and attorney fees.

Clackamas County landlords still answer to Oregon statute, and that is a real body of law. They simply do not carry this particular municipal layer on top of it.

The Single-Unit Landlord Exemption in Portland No Longer Exists

This one deserves its own section, because the internet is full of stale versions of it and I still hear it repeated at open houses.

There is no longer an exemption from relocation assistance for a landlord who owns exactly one rental unit in Portland. It is not in the current exemption list, and the Portland Housing Bureau program page that enumerates the exemptions does not include it. If you own one non-owner-occupied rental inside city limits, you carry the full obligation.

What survives is a different shape entirely. The current exemptions are owner-occupancy-shaped rather than portfolio-size-shaped, and they include situations like these.

• The tenant occupies the same dwelling unit as the landlord.
• The tenant occupies one half of a duplex where the landlord lives in the other half.
• The tenant occupies an accessory dwelling unit where the owner lives on site.
• The landlord is temporarily renting out their own principal residence, for up to three years.
• The landlord is on military deployment.

Notice the pattern. Every one of them involves the owner living at the property. That is the opposite of the profile most investors have, and it is worth saying plainly: a DSCR loan is a non-owner-occupied product by definition, so if you are buying with one, you are almost certainly outside these carve-outs.

One more procedural detail that catches people. Most of these exemptions are not self-executing. They generally have to be filed with the Portland Housing Bureau and acknowledged in writing, so an owner who qualifies on paper but never filed can still be in trouble. Confirm the filing requirements for your situation with an attorney.

Portland Landlord Rules vs Clackamas County on Screening, Deposits, and Registration

Three more Portland-only layers sit underneath the relocation rule, and each of them changes day-to-day operations rather than just exit economics.

FAIR screening, PCC 30.01.086. A Portland landlord either adopts the city's low-barrier screening criteria as a safe harbor, or applies stricter standards and then performs a documented individual assessment before denying an applicant. The low-barrier limits are specific. Among other things they bar rejecting an applicant for a credit score of 500 or higher, for past-due debt under $1,000, for a discharged bankruptcy, for medical or education debt, for misdemeanors older than three years, for felonies older than seven years, or for eviction judgments three or more years old.

The income screen inside that rule is two-tier, and this is the detail I most often see written wrong. It is not a flat 2x rent. Where the rent is at or above the 80% area median income maximum-rent threshold, the cap on what you may require is 2x rent. Where rent falls below that threshold, it is 2.5x rent. Income is counted net of vouchers and subsidies, and guarantor income is capped at 3x rent.

Deposits, PCC 30.01.087. If you collect last month's rent up front, the additional security deposit is capped at half a month's rent. If you do not, the cap is one month's rent. Penalties under the screening and deposit sections run up to $250 per violation, plus damages and fees.

Registration. Portland requires an annual Residential Rental Registration, filed on Schedule R with the Business License Tax return, at $70 per unit for tax year 2025. It is a modest number on one house and a real line item on a small portfolio, and it has no equivalent anywhere in my Clackamas County service area.

In Oregon City, Milwaukie, Happy Valley, Lake Oswego, West Linn, Wilsonville, Canby, Molalla, and unincorporated Clackamas County, none of the three applies. You screen and set deposits under state law, and there is no city rental registration to file.

The One Rule That Applies in Portland and Clackamas County Alike

Oregon's statewide rent stabilization law does not care about city limits. It applies to a rental in Sellwood-Moreland and to a rental in Canby identically.

For 2026 the maximum annual increase on a sitting tenant is 9.5%, published by the Oregon Department of Administrative Services under the formula in ORS 90.324. I walk that number and how it interacts with a rental underwrite in my guide to the Oregon rent increase cap and your DSCR loan.

Two clarifications save a lot of grief. There is no small-landlord or single-family exemption from the state cap. The "four or fewer residential dwelling units" threshold people remember lives in ORS 90.427(6)(b) and exempts only the relocation payment owed on a qualifying-landlord-reason termination, which is a separate ruleset. And the 6% figure that circulates online is for manufactured dwelling parks and floating-home marinas over 30 spaces under ORS 90.600, not for a conventional rental.

The one genuine carve-out from the state cap is new construction, measured by certificate of occupancy date, which I cover in detail in my guide to Oregon's 15-year rent cap exemption.

Now stack the two systems on a Portland property. The state caps the increase at 9.5%, and Portland's relocation trigger fires at 10%. Those thresholds sit close enough together that a Portland owner is functionally boxed in by the state cap well before the city trigger, which is a useful thing to notice when you are modeling rent growth on a Portland hold.

Which of My Market Pages Sit Inside Portland Landlord Rules

I write about neighborhoods on both sides of this line, so here is the plain sort for the areas I cover.

Each of those six Portland neighborhoods is an officially recognized City of Portland neighborhood, with Johns Landing sitting within the broader South Portland neighborhood. My two wider pages, Portland home loans and Southeast Portland home loans, straddle the line on purpose, since readers land on them from addresses on both sides. If you are working from either of those pages, the address-level check matters more, not less.

Milwaukie is the case I would flag hardest. It borders Sellwood-Moreland closely enough that two rentals a short drive apart can carry completely different obligations, and the drive does not feel like a jurisdictional change.

Portland Landlord Rules vs Clackamas County in a DSCR Underwrite

Start with what does not move. A DSCR loan, short for debt service coverage ratio, qualifies the property on its rental income rather than on your personal income. The lender measures qualifying rent from the signed lease or the appraiser's rent schedule against full PITIA, meaning principal, interest, taxes, insurance, and any association dues. The parent guide on DSCR loans in Clackamas County covers how the product works.

No underwriter is going to price a file differently because the property sits in Portland rather than Milwaukie. Eligibility and terms depend on the program and the property, and anything I quote is subject to credit approval and a full loan estimate.

Where jurisdiction shows up is in the pro forma, and in three places specifically.

• Turnover cost. On a Portland unit, a plan that involves ending a tenancy or repositioning rent aggressively may carry a relocation payment that a Clackamas County version of the same plan does not.
• Lease-up speed. FAIR screening changes how you evaluate applicants and how you document a denial, which is a process cost rather than a hard dollar cost, but it is real.
• Carry. The $70 per unit registration and the compliance overhead belong in the operating column, not in a footnote.

None of that argues against buying inside Portland. Plenty of good holds sit in Sellwood-Moreland and Lents, and I have financed them. It argues for pricing the jurisdiction honestly instead of running a Clackamas County pro forma on a Portland address. If you are also weighing how to hold title, my guide to buying an Oregon rental in an LLC covers the financing side of that question, and entity structure itself is a conversation for your attorney or CPA.

One more layer sits on top of all of this if the plan involves nightly stays rather than a lease. Portland runs its own accessory short-term rental permit program with an owner-occupancy requirement, and each Clackamas County city writes its own rule, several of them stricter than people expect. My guide to short-term rental rules in Clackamas County sorts that out city by city.

Frequently Asked Questions About Portland Landlord Rules vs Clackamas County

Do Portland landlord rules apply in Clackamas County?

Does a Portland mailing address mean a property is subject to Portland landlord rules?

Is a landlord who owns one rental exempt from Portland relocation assistance?

Can a rent increase alone trigger relocation assistance in Portland?

What is Portland's income-to-rent screening limit?

Does jurisdiction change how a DSCR loan is underwritten?