Houston now requires landlords to provide refrigerated-air equipment in every habitable room of a rental dwelling. City Council adopted Ordinance No. 2026-0732 in August 2026, twelve votes to two, eliminating the old alternative that let a landlord satisfy the code with window screens instead of mechanical cooling. Landlords get 120 days from approval to comply, with "reasonable and continuous progress" expected in the meantime.
That is the ordinance as it fits in a headline. What follows is the ordinance as it fits in a tenant's afternoon: the sequence of tasks the enforcement structure assigns to the person it is supposed to protect, starting with figuring out whether a violation exists and ending with the light bill on the equipment the landlord eventually installs.
The temperature formula
The ordinance keeps Houston's existing standard. Equipment must hold each habitable space at either 20 degrees below the outdoor temperature or 80°F, whichever number is higher.
Read that once more, because the second half of it does the work. Below 100°F outside, the indoor standard sits at 80. Once the outdoor temperature crosses 100, the formula starts to move:
| Outdoor Temperature | Indoor Standard |
|---|---|
| 100°F | 80°F |
| 105°F | 85°F |
| 109°F | 89°F |
The hotter the day, the more room the formula gives the landlord.
The requirement applies room by room. Under Houston's building code, "habitable space" means rooms used for living, sleeping, eating, or cooking. Bathrooms, closets, hallways, and storage areas do not count. One window unit in the living room does not satisfy the ordinance if the bedroom cannot meet the formula.
The city's FAQ says central air, window units, portable units, or other refrigerated-air equipment all qualify. Whether an evaporative cooler counts is unresolved. The ordinance specifies "refrigerated air equipment," and federal technical guidance treats refrigerant-based cooling and evaporative cooling as two different machines doing two different things. The published materials don't settle it.
Knowing you have a violation
Enforcement begins when a tenant contacts 311. So the tenant has to know there is something to report, and the ordinance tests equipment capability, not whether a person is comfortable. A tenant who is hot has a complaint. A tenant who can demonstrate that the installed equipment cannot hold the temperature formula in a habitable room has a violation. Nothing the city has published explains how a tenant is supposed to tell those two apart.
To run the formula yourself you need two numbers, outdoor temperature and indoor temperature. The ordinance does not say which outdoor reading counts: the nearest National Weather Service station, the airport, a thermometer on the porch railing. It does not say where in the room to measure, or for how long, or whether the equipment should be run flat out for some period first. Houston's heating provision specifies measurement at three feet above the floor. The cooling provision says nothing comparable.
The American Housing Survey found that 13.2 million U.S. households reported being uncomfortably hot for at least 24 hours in 2023. Of those, 11.6 million had some form of air conditioning. In 4.9 million of the air-conditioned households, equipment breakdown was named as a reason the home stayed hot. Having equipment and having a cooled room are two separate conditions, and most of the trouble sits between them.
The calculation before the call
Say the tenant has a thermometer, has taken readings, and is satisfied the equipment cannot meet the formula. The next step is calling 311. Before that call, the tenant is weighing something the ordinance never mentions.
Texas Property Code Section 92.331 prohibits a landlord from retaliating against a tenant who complains in good faith to a government code-enforcement entity. For six months after a protected complaint, the landlord cannot file an eviction, cut services, raise rent, or terminate the lease for retaliatory reasons. The burden of proving nonretaliation falls on the landlord.
Six months is six months. The statute also recognizes nonretaliatory grounds: rent delinquency, material lease violations, project-wide changes, certain end-of-term decisions. A landlord who declines to renew a lease seven months after a complaint faces no statutory presumption of anything. And if the inspector finds no code violation, the statute creates a rebuttable presumption that the tenant's retaliation claim was brought in bad faith, which puts the tenant on the hook for the landlord's costs and attorney's fees.
So the tenant weighing a 311 call is setting six months of protection against the remainder of a lease, the local rental market, and the possibility that an inspector's instrument will not confirm what the tenant's body already knows.
Filing the complaint
Houston 311 takes calls around the clock and accepts requests online and through a mobile app. Most requests can be filed anonymously, though the city notes that contact information may be needed to complete some investigations. Intake asks for location, service category, and a description.
The published materials do not require the tenant to submit a temperature measurement before requesting an inspection. They also do not tell the tenant which department will handle the complaint. Houston's Multi-Family Habitability program covers properties with three or more units. Complaints about duplexes and single-family rentals route elsewhere, including to the Department of Neighborhoods. The tenant may not learn which track applies until after filing.
There is a further wrinkle, and it is not a small one. The municipal 311 process and the tenant's rights under Texas Property Code Chapter 92 are separate tracks with different requirements. The state repair-remedy process requires the tenant to notify the landlord directly, stay current on rent, and, for certain remedies, send written notice by trackable mail and then wait a reasonable period. Seven days is a rebuttable presumption of reasonableness. Houston's own tenant guidance puts both tracks on a single page. A tenant following city instructions could reasonably conclude that the 311 call satisfies the state notice requirement. It does not.
Waiting for the inspector
The city's Building Code Enforcement page says it will "respond" to a possible violation within seven to ten business days. It does not define respond. Initial contact, a scheduled appointment, a completed inspection, or a written finding could each qualify.
A 2021 city presentation reported 14 multifamily habitability inspectors handling roughly 350 service requests a month. A 2023 news report counted 184 AC complaints filed with Houston 311 in June of that year, up from 63 in May, and quoted a city official saying most apartment complaints were getting a response within 24 to 48 hours after eight additional Health Department inspectors were budgeted. Neither figure is current. No public data was located for the number of inspectors now assigned to cooling complaints, for current complaint volume, for backlog, or for the distribution of response times.
When the inspector arrives, Houston code allows the inspection to proceed with verbal or written permission from an owner, manager, or person who appears to be in control of the premises. If access is refused, the inspector generally needs an administrative search warrant. The code does not require the complaining tenant to be present. The city has not published an AC-specific appointment window, a missed-appointment procedure, or any assurance that inspection will happen during the hours when the equipment's limits actually show, which is to say the afternoon.
The measurement protocol nobody has published
No air-conditioning-specific measurement protocol was located in the adopted ordinance, the city's FAQ, Chapter 10 of the code, the 311 instructions, the Multi-Family Habitability page, or the Building Code Enforcement investigations page. Nothing specifies instrument type, measurement height, room position, sampling duration, required time of day, outdoor-temperature source, or what to do about doors, windows, and equipment run time during the test.
Inspectors may well have an internal practice. But the tenant filing the complaint cannot know in advance what will be measured, how, or under what conditions. A violation the tenant lives through at two in the afternoon may or may not register on the inspector's instrument at ten in the morning.
In an earlier piece in this publication, Ivy Marlowe examined how the sentence "The apartment has air conditioning" can close off every question that follows: whether the equipment works, whether it cools the room, whether the tenant can afford to run it. The measurement step is where that sentence gets tested. The rules of the test are not public.
The cure period
If the inspector finds a violation, the city's FAQ says the landlord gets an opportunity to correct it. Section 10-366 of the code authorizes a criminal citation after a written warning and a "reasonable opportunity to cure," or an administrative citation under the city's enforcement provisions.
The FAQ does not attach a number of days to that cure period. Neither does the code.
By this point the tenant is living inside three different clocks that were never set against each other. There is the ordinance's 120-day implementation period, which governs the initial rollout. There is the undefined reasonable opportunity to cure an individual violation. And there is the seven-day rebuttable presumption under state law, which belongs to the private repair track and not to this one at all. The published materials do not reconcile the three or tell the tenant which one determines what happens next.
For however long the cure period turns out to run, the tenant goes on living with the condition that prompted the complaint.
The bill
Suppose the whole chain holds. The landlord provides compliant equipment. A window unit appears in the bedroom, a portable unit in the living room. The ordinance is satisfied.
The ordinance requires the owner to provide and maintain the equipment. It says nothing about who pays for the electricity to run it. The code states that building standards do not alter private lease agreements, though a lease cannot excuse an owner from code compliance. The FAQ links to no utility-payment program and no cooling subsidy.
At Texas's June 2026 average residential electricity price of 15.94 cents per kilowatt-hour, running a standard 10,000-Btu portable unit costs roughly $50 a month under federal EnergyGuide assumptions, about $15 more than a comparable window unit. A landlord shopping for the cheapest equipment to buy may be buying the most expensive equipment to operate. The ordinance draws no distinction between the two costs and does not care which party carries which.
Assistance programs exist. Texas's Comprehensive Energy Assistance Program distributes federal money through local agencies, with the warning that funds may be unavailable once an agency's allocation runs out. BakerRipley, which administers utility assistance in Harris County, operates in periodic windows: it accepts a fixed number of applications, then closes the portal until the next cycle. In a recent round the portal shut after 3,000 applications and stayed shut for roughly two months. Each program has its own application, its own eligibility documentation, its own wait. Neither the ordinance nor its FAQ mentions any of them.
What the process requires of the person it protects
The tenant has to learn the temperature formula and understand why it slides upward on the worst days. Get a thermometer and use it correctly. Pick an outdoor reference temperature the ordinance declines to specify. Grasp that the question is equipment capability rather than personal comfort. Weigh six months of statutory protection against the remaining term of a lease and the local rental market. Work the 311 system, and keep the municipal complaint track separate from the state repair-remedy track, which the city's own guidance runs together on one page. Be available when an inspector arrives on a schedule nobody has published, and accept that the measurement protocol is not written down anywhere the tenant can read it. Wait out an undefined cure period in the unit as it stands. Then, if equipment finally arrives, find a way to pay for the power to run it through programs that may or may not be taking applications that month.
Every step assumes something: that the tenant knows the law, has time during working hours and a working phone, reads enough English to parse a FAQ published only in English, can physically tolerate the heat through the wait, can pay for the electricity afterward, and is willing to be identified to the landlord as the person who called.
Houston's ordinance creates a right. The complaint-driven enforcement chain is the distance between that right and a cooled room. Each step in that chain is work assigned to the tenant, and the ordinance does not acknowledge that work, reimburse it, or count it.
- The signed ordinance text: The council action record establishes the ordinance number and 120-day amendment, but the signed instrument and mayoral approval date had not appeared in City Secretary records at our research cutoff, which means the exact compliance deadline can't yet be converted to a calendar date.
- Equipment breakdown and hot homes: A 2026 study in Nature Health estimated that household air-conditioning use averted more than 5,000 heat-related deaths annually in the U.S. during 2000–2019, with benefits plateauing above median usage — a population-level finding that doesn't tell you whether any particular room is adequately cooled.
- Inspection capacity after the ordinance: A March 2026 Houston Health Department presentation reported nearly 13,000 apartment-compliance cases over three years across all complaint types, but published no cooling-specific inspector count, response-time distribution, or backlog measure that would show whether enforcement can absorb the new ordinance's demands.
- Emergency-department visits during heat: A 19-state study published in August 2026 estimated that heat accounted for roughly 9% of all emergency-department visits during the worst days of the 2025 U.S. heatwaves, though the state-day methodology can't be converted into a household thermostat threshold or individual diagnosis.