Original research · 50 states + D.C.
We read every state’s bed bug law. Published guidance got 20 things wrong.
To build this site we read the enacted statute, regulation or reported case for all fifty states and the District of Columbia — not other people’s summaries. That was meant to be a quality control. It turned into a finding: much of the bed bug legal guidance online is simply wrong, including statutory duties that were never enacted and holdings courts expressly refused to create. Below is every material error we logged, with the primary source we checked it against. The full write-ups are on the corrections page; the raw data is downloadable.
51/51
Jurisdictions read against the primary source — 50 states + D.C.
20
Material corrections logged
5
Statutory duties that do not exist
3
Sites trading as legal aid or national authorities
How we checked
- We opened the enacted chapter, not a section fragment or a bill. Several published “laws” trace back to bills that never passed — one to a bill that died in 2011.
- We read the section heading before the section, and verified case names, not just numbers. Some guidance cites the right statute for the wrong remedy, or attributes a holding to the wrong state.
- Every state entry on the site links the primary source it was built from, so any claim here can be checked against the statute itself. See the corrections page for the full method and each write-up.
Every material error we found
Each row is a claim that appears in published bed bug guidance, next to what the law actually says. Some entries cover more than one state.
| State(s) | What’s commonly published | What the law actually says |
|---|---|---|
| North Carolina | Landlords may not lease a knowingly infested unit; tenants must give notice within five days; cost shifts to the tenant after sixty days; local ordinances are preempted. Cited to G.S. 42-42(a)(9), 42-43(a)(8) and 42-43.1. | None of those provisions exist. The enacted § 42-42(a) runs (1) to (8); § 42-43(a) runs (1) to (7); and the chapter goes straight from § 42-43 to § 42-44. All three belong to House Bill 721 of 2011, which was not enacted. |
| Washington | Washington landlords must disclose in writing any bed bug infestation in the unit or building within the past twelve months before a tenant signs, and must supply Department of Health bed bug materials at move-in. | Neither duty exists. RCW 59.18 contains no bed bug disclosure provision, and House Bill 1440 of 2019 — cited alongside these claims — was an act providing longer notice of rent increases. The written-health-hazard duty in § 59.18.060 is the mould disclosure added in 2005, which appears to be what was misread. |
| Montana | Mont. Code Ann. § 70-24-303 requires the landlord to keep the property free from vermin and rodents. | It does not. The section enumerates seven landlord duties — codes, fit and habitable, common areas, building systems, waste receptacles, water and heat, and detectors. Vermin, rodents and pests appear nowhere in it. |
| Kansas | The Kansas Supreme Court has held that the landlord's duty under § 58-2553 is non-delegable, citing "Jackson v. Dakota Ridge Board of Directors". | Dakota Ridge is not a Kansas landlord-tenant authority. The case name does not support the proposition attributed to it, and the page carrying it had the confident statutory formatting and plausible reporter citation typical of generated legal content. |
| Maryland | Montgomery County requires notice to all adjacent-unit tenants plus "block" inspections when an infestation is reported. | Unsupported. Nothing corroborates it in the Maryland People's Law Library, in county code searches, or in the published work of firms that litigate Maryland bed bug cases — including in Montgomery County. It appears only in pest-control marketing content. |
| New York | N.Y. Real Property Law § 235-bb requires landlords to disclose bed bug infestation history before a tenant signs. | § 235-BB is "Certificates of occupancy; required disclosure to tenant" and has nothing to do with bed bugs. The Bedbug Disclosure Act sits at § 235-j, "Duty to inform of bed bug infestation". |
| Oklahoma | Oklahoma protects tenants from landlord retaliation — attributed variously to § 41-123, to § 41-121, and to the Act generally without citation. | § 41-123 is wrongful removal or exclusion. § 41-121 is the tenant remedies section. And the Oklahoma Law Review states that Oklahoma has declined to adopt any prohibition on retaliatory eviction, either judicially or legislatively, citing Schuminsky v. Field, in which the state Supreme Court expressly declined to address it. |
| Utah | Utah has no retaliation statute at all. Or § 57-22-5.1 protects tenants who complain about code violations and habitability. Or the anti-retaliation provision is § 57-22-5. | None of those. § 57-22-5.1 exists, so the first is wrong; it bars penalizing or evicting a renter for requesting assistance from a PUBLIC SAFETY AGENCY and gives crime and domestic violence victims lock-change and termination rights — it says nothing about habitability complaints, so the second is wrong; and § 57-22-5 is the renter’s duties section, so the third is citing the wrong provision entirely. |
| Wyoming | The warranty of habitability cannot be waived or modified under Wyo. Stat. § 1-21-1202. | Subsection (d) of that very section reads: any duty or obligation in this article may be assigned to a different party or modified by explicit written agreement signed by the parties. Wyoming is the most waivable state in the country, and its own Judicial Branch guide flags subsection (d) with an emphatic "HOWEVER". |
| West Virginia | West Virginia tenants may withhold rent, repair and deduct, and terminate. | Two of three are right. In Teller v. McCoy, 253 S.E.2d 114 (1978), the Court declined to adopt repair-and-deduct — over a dissent objecting that the majority "fails to accord the tenant the right to repair the defect and deduct this cost from his rent" and calling the refusal "rather strange". |
| Kansas | Repair-and-deduct is available under § 58-2559. Or under § 58-2561. Or under § 58-2561 capped at one month's rent. Or as a route to procure substitute essential services. | Kansas has no repair-and-deduct statute. § 58-2561 is titled "Action for possession for nonpayment of rent; counterclaim, waiver; accrued rent, payment into court" — a defensive provision available only once the landlord sues. One source asserted two of these contradictory positions within a single article. |
| Wisconsin | Wis. Stat. § 704.07(4) is a repair-and-deduct remedy capped at one month's rent. | § 704.07(4) is titled Untenantability. It gives two things: the right to remove from the premises, or — if you stay — rent abating to the extent you are deprived of the full normal use of the premises. There is no statutory repair-and-deduct in Wisconsin. |
| Missouri · North Dakota | Missouri's repair-and-deduct cap is $300 or half a month's rent, whichever is less. North Dakota's § 47-16-13 deduction is subject to a limit tied to one month's rent. | Missouri's § 441.234.2 says whichever is greater, capped at one month's rent — the opposite reading. North Dakota's section contains no monetary limit at all; that figure appears to have been imported from other states' statutes. |
| Georgia · Kentucky · Oregon | All three states protect tenants through an implied warranty of habitability. | Georgia has no implied warranty — only a narrower statutory duty to repair, and its courts hold that duty does not include maintenance. Kentucky recognises no common-law warranty at all, and its statutory scheme applies only in cities and counties that individually adopted it. Oregon's courts have not recognized an implied warranty either (Bellikka v. Green, 306 Or 630), though its statute is strong enough that it matters less. |
| Arizona · Florida | Arizona has one of the more detailed bed bug statutes. Florida has no bed-bug-specific provision. | Reversed on both counts. Arizona's § 33-1319(E) expressly creates no cause of action against a landlord for bed bug damages, (D) excludes single-family residences, and § 9-500.31 forbids any city from filling the gap. Florida's § 83.51(2)(a)1 names bedbugs by name in the landlord's extermination duty. |
Full write-ups and citations: the corrections page. Raw data: bed-bug-law-audit.csv. Verified against primary sources on .
Using this research
- Journalists, tenant organizations and legal-aid groups are welcome to cite this audit and the dataset. Each correction links the enacted statute so you can verify it independently.
- Found an error in our work? That is the whole point — tell us and we’ll fix it in public. Report a correction.
- Want the underlying state-by-state analysis? Start with the law by state.
Verified against primary sources on . Statutes change every legislative session; where a correction matters to a decision, open the cited section yourself before relying on it.