Raise the rent twice inside twelve months on a Queensland property and you have committed an offence, with a maximum penalty of 20 penalty units. In Victoria, the written notice you owe a tenant before a rise stretched from 60 days to 90 on 25 November 2025. In South Australia there is no ceiling on the amount at all, but your tenant has 90 days to ask a tribunal to declare the increase excessive. None of these rules is secret, but they sit scattered across five regulators and they have changed in pieces, which is part of why talk of property investors leaving the rental market in Australia in 2026 keeps coming up.
Here is what the rules now say in Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and the ACT, and what rent control did in the overseas markets that ran it much harder. It also covers how NSW is writing rules for large-scale rental, and where the tax clock starts if you change how you use a property you own.
What a rent cap actually is
A rent cap limits rent increases: either the amount, or how often they can happen. Frequency is the usual form, generally once a year, though in some jurisdictions landlords can raise the rent twice. Nearly every rule below works that way, controlling how often rent can rise and how much notice you give rather than the size of the rise.
Rent increase rules in Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and the ACT
Queensland
Rent cannot be increased unless at least 12 months have passed since the current amount became payable, and the clock is unforgiving: it runs even if the last increase happened under a different agreement, with a different tenant, or through a previous agent or owner. Queensland limited increases to once a year across all tenancies from 1 July 2023, and from 6 June 2024 the limit applies to the property rather than the tenancy, so a new tenant does not reset it.
Increasing the rent inside twelve months is an offence with a maximum penalty of 20 penalty units. You must give at least two months’ written notice for a general tenancy, or four weeks for rooming accommodation. The date of the last rent increase must appear in the tenancy agreement, and if your tenant asks for written proof of it, you have 14 days to provide it. Since 6 June 2024 rent bidding is banned as well: owners and managers must not solicit, invite or accept offers of rent above the advertised amount.
Victoria
In most cases rent cannot be increased more than once every 12 months. For agreements that started on or after 19 June 2019 that is the rule. For fixed-term agreements that contain a clause allowing rent increases during the fixed term, agreements that started before 19 June 2019 could have the rent raised once every six months. During a fixed term you cannot increase the rent at all unless the agreement contains a clause allowing it, and that clause must state how the increase will be calculated.
The notice period is the part that moved recently: from 25 November 2025 the minimum notice for a rent increase is 90 days, up from 60. Long-term agreements, the ones running more than five years, allow an increase no more than once every 12 months, and only if the agreement itself says rent can be increased.
Western Australia
On a periodic tenancy, one with no fixed end date, rent can rise no more than once every 12 months, with at least 60 days’ written notice on the prescribed form: Form 10 for a residential tenancy, Form RP10 for a residential park. The notice must include the amount of the increase and the day it takes effect.
Renewing with the same tenant does not reset the clock. A renewed agreement is treated as continuous, so there must still be 12 months since the last increase. The regulator’s worked example makes the sequence concrete: rent last increased on 30 May 2025, so notice can go out on or after 31 March 2026, and the earliest the new rent can start is 30 May 2026.
South Australia
There is no limit to how much rent can be increased. The constraints are procedural: at least 60 days’ written notice, and at least 12 months since the last increase or the start of the agreement. During a fixed term, an increase can only happen if the agreement contains a condition allowing increases that states how the rise will be worked out, CPI for example.
The check on the amount sits with the tribunal. Your tenant can apply to the South Australian Civil and Administrative Tribunal within 90 days of the notice and ask for the increase to be declared excessive. In deciding, SACAT weighs the rent for comparable premises, the condition of the property, and whether the rise is disproportionate to the previous rent.
The ACT
The ACT is the only Australian jurisdiction with an objective guideline written into its excessive rent increase provisions. Where an increase would be more than 110 per cent of the increase in the rent component of the ACT Consumer Price Index over the relevant period, the landlord must apply to the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal. There the landlord must demonstrate that the increase is not excessive against prevailing market rents for comparable premises.
What rent control did where it was tried harder
New York is the most commonly quoted example of rent control in law. Apartments in buildings built before February 1947 can have rent raised by up to 7.5 per cent a year, up to a ceiling set by a rent control board. Those apartments are available only to the original tenants or their heirs, and when the original tenant leaves or dies, the apartment reverts to rent stabilisation or the unregulated market. The softer scheme, rent stabilisation, covers buildings with six or more apartments built between 1947 and 1974. In 2017, 45 per cent of New York’s tenant households lived in stabilised dwellings, 1 per cent in rent-controlled ones, and 42 per cent in unregulated private rentals.
The research on what happened when those controls loosened explains why economists argue about them. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Brookings studies found that when rent control was removed, landlords moved to market rents and the value of those properties rose 45 per cent. The policy had imposed $2.0 billion in costs on local property owners, of which only $300 million was actually transferred to renters in controlled apartments. In San Francisco, research on the lifting of stabilisation from some dwelling types found the beneficiaries were 19 per cent less likely to move. Rent-controlled buildings were 8 percentage points more likely to convert to condominiums than buildings in the control group, and the number of renters living in the treated buildings fell by 15 percentage points relative to 1994 levels.
Read together, the findings describe a trade. Tenants in controlled homes stay put longer and pay below market; the cost shows up in the stock, as buildings convert and renters move out of the covered pool. None of it predicts what frequency caps and notice rules will do in Australia, because those are a different design. It does show what the argument is about.
The supply side: build-to-rent
While the rules above constrain how individual landlords raise the rent, NSW has spent the same years writing rules to make large-scale rental easier to build and to keep rental. Build-to-rent housing is large-scale, purpose-built rental housing that is held in single ownership and professionally managed. It entered the NSW planning system in February 2021, and the provisions moved into the Housing SEPP when that policy was made in November 2021.
The settings show what the government wants from it: stock that stays rental. The provisions prevent residential subdivision for 15 years in all zones, and in the E2 and SP5 zones a build-to-rent development can never be subdivided into separate lots. Any part of a build-to-rent building that faces a road in a business zone must have active uses at street level. Large projects get a fast lane: the state-significant development pathway is open to build-to-rent developments with a capital investment value above $50 million in Greater Sydney, except the City of Sydney, and above $30 million everywhere else. The settings are still being tuned. On 14 December 2023 the government allowed subdivision of the non-tenanted component of a build-to-rent building in the B3 Commercial Core and E2 Commercial Centre zones, and extended those settings to the SP5 Metropolitan Centre zone. An amendment on 17 April 2026 clarified that lot consolidation needed to bring all build-to-rent buildings onto one lot can happen after development consent is issued.
For an individual investor, build-to-rent is the competition: purpose-built, professionally managed rental stock arriving at scale, in the same tenant market your property rents into.
If you change how you use a property: the six-year rule
If your response to all this is to change what a property does, moving into your rental yourself, or renting out the home you’re about to leave, one ATO rule decides the capital gains treatment.
Normally a property stops being your main residence when you stop living in it. For capital gains tax purposes you can keep treating it as your main residence for up to 6 years if it produces income, such as rent, the rule known as the six-year rule, and indefinitely if it produces no income. For as long as you treat it as your main residence it stays exempt from CGT, even with tenants in it.
Three limits catch people out. You cannot treat another property as your main residence for the same period, except for up to 6 months while you are moving house. If the property produces income for more than 6 years in one absence, it becomes subject to CGT for the period past the limit. And if you are a foreign resident when the CGT event happens, you generally cannot claim the main residence exemption at all.
The ATO’s worked example shows what exceeding the limit costs. Roya’s property made a $320,000 capital gain. She had rented it for 6,940 days beyond the six-year limit out of 9,133 days of ownership, so the assessable gain came to $243,162, halved to $121,581 by the 50 per cent discount and reported on her 2025 tax return. The maths runs on days, so keep the dates: when you moved out, when each lease started, when it ended.
Decide on current data
Whatever you decide, decide it on numbers that are current. In NSW, Communities and Justice publishes quarterly rent and sales reports, with the latest covering rents for the June 2026 quarter and sales for the March 2026 quarter alongside interactive dashboards; the page was last updated on 18 August 2026.
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