Corrections log · methodology
We read all fifty-one bed bug laws. Most published coverage was wrong.
Every state entry on this site was built by reading the statute itself rather than summarizing other people's summaries. That was meant to be a quality measure. It turned into a finding.
Roughly two in five states had something materially wrong in the existing coverage — not nuance, not staleness, but statutes that do not exist, citations pointing at unrelated sections, and remedies described as available that the state's highest court expressly refused to adopt.
51
States read against the primary source
20
Material corrections logged
5
Statutory duties that do not exist
3
Sites trading as legal aid or national authorities
Duties that do not exist
The most serious category. In each case a source describes a legal obligation in confident, specific terms — often with a statute number attached — and the provision cannot be found in the enacted law.
North Carolina
A bed bug regime built on a bill that died in 2011
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.
Verified by reading the enacted Chapter 42 in full. Bill text and enacted statute text are near-indistinguishable in search results, which is how this propagates. North Carolina →
Washington
A disclosure duty that was never written
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.
A tenant relying on this would believe they had a pre-lease claim that does not exist. Washington →
Montana
A pest company inventing a pest duty
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.
Checked against the Montana Code Annotated as published by the legislature. Montana →
Kansas
A holding attributed to another state's case
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.
Kansas does have a real non-delegability rule — but it is in § 58-2553(d), not in that case. Statute numbers are easy to verify; fabricated case names are where this hides. Kansas →
Maryland
A county procedure nobody can locate
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.
Recorded as unsupported rather than false: the county code was not read directly. Maryland →
Sites trading as legal aid
The most dangerous category foundSites were encountered using the naming pattern "<State> Legal Services Authority" on .com domains — one for South Carolina, one for Alaska. Both made statutory claims that did not survive checking: the South Carolina page described a repair-and-deduct remedy under a section titled wrongful failure to provide essential services, and the Alaska page misstated both AS 34.03.180 and AS 34.03.300.
This matters more than the pest-industry errors, because it borrows the credibility of exactly the institutions a careful reader is told to trust. Legal aid organizations in the United States are almost always .org. South Carolina's genuine provider is South Carolina Legal Services; Alaska's is the Alaska Legal Services Corporation.
A third instance turned up later. A site trading as "National Tenant Services Authority" — same construction, also .com — states that the implied warranty of habitability is "a doctrine upheld in landlord-tenant law across all 50 states." That is demonstrably false, and this project can disprove it from its own primary-source reading: Arkansas has no implied warranty of habitability at all, Georgia has only a narrower duty to repair, Kentucky recognises no common-law warranty, and Oregon's courts have expressly not recognized one (Bellikka v. Green, 306 Or 630). Four states, contradicting a claim made about fifty.
Before trusting a page that presents itself as legal aid or as a national authority, check the domain, check the organization exists, and test one claim you can already verify.
Citations pointing at the wrong law
Less alarming than a fabrication, and more common. A real statute number attached to a proposition it does not support — which is harder to catch, because the citation checks out until you read it.
New York
An entire niche repeating one wrong section
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".
The substance of the claim is right — New York does have a statewide disclosure duty — but every source checked cited the wrong section. New York →
Oklahoma
Three sources, three different wrong sections, one missing law
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.
The most consequential error found. Elsewhere bad advice costs a remedy; here a tenant who complains believing they are shielded may face a rent increase or non-renewal with no recourse. Oklahoma →
Utah
Three sources, three different answers, one narrow statute
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.
The accurate position matters: Utah creates no general presumption that an adverse action after a repair request is retaliatory, unlike California, Illinois or Iowa. A tenant told otherwise may complain believing they are shielded when they are not. Utah →
Wyoming
Stated backwards
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".
A tenant told their rights were unwaivable would not think to read their lease — which in Wyoming is where the answer usually is. Wyoming →
West Virginia
A remedy the Supreme Court refused to create
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".
A tenant following that advice would deduct a treatment cost with no legal basis, and be short on rent. West Virginia →
Kansas
Four answers to one question, none correct
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.
The correct answer — that the remedy does not exist — appeared in none of them. Kansas →
Wisconsin
The right section, the wrong remedy
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.
Reading it properly also revealed that § 704.07 creates no private cause of action at all — Wisconsin's real teeth are in the separate consumer-protection route, which awards double damages. Wisconsin →
Missouri · North Dakota
Caps invented, and caps imported
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.
A guide also described N.D. ch. 47-16.1 as URLTA adopted by individual cities. North Dakota never adopted URLTA. Missouri → North Dakota →
Georgia · Kentucky · Oregon
Warranties of habitability that do not exist
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.
In Kentucky this is decisive: in most of the state's 120 counties there is no statutory habitability duty and no common-law fallback, so the lease is the entire rulebook. Georgia → Kentucky →
Arizona · Florida
Strong laws described as weak, and weak as strong
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.
Why this happens
Three mechanisms explain nearly all of it, and none require anyone to be acting in bad faith.
Bill text reads exactly like statute text. Search results do not distinguish a proposed section from an enacted one. North Carolina's phantom regime and several smaller errors all trace to legislation that was introduced, covered, indexed, and then quietly died.
Summaries get summarised. Once a wrong section number enters circulation, every subsequent page copies it rather than opening the statute. New York's § 235-bb has been repeated across an entire niche for years.
Numbers migrate between states. Caps and cure periods are the most-copied details and the least-checked. North Dakota acquired a one-month cap it does not have; Missouri's got inverted.
Two source categories were consistently unreliable: pest-control companies writing about who is legally required to pay for pest control, and renter-guide sites with no named author. Legal aid organizations, state law libraries and legislative reference services held up almost without exception.
How to check any of this yourself
Everything above is verifiable in a few minutes, and you should not take our word for it either.
Open the enacted chapter, not the section
A missing subdivision is only visible in context. North Carolina's fabrication was obvious the moment the whole of § 42-42 was on screen.
Check the URL for /bills/ or a session number
If a citation traces to a legislature's bill pages rather than its statute pages, it is proposed law until proven otherwise.
Read the section heading before the section
Kansas, Wisconsin and Oklahoma were all resolved by their titles alone. A remedy described as repair-and-deduct that sits under a heading about non-payment actions is not repair-and-deduct.
Verify case names, not just statute numbers
Statute numbers are easy to check and usually right. Fabricated authority hides in reporter citations that look plausible.
Test an unfamiliar source against a state you know
The single most useful technique. A page that described Maine as a bare habitability state — when Maine has a detailed bed bug statute with five and ten-day clocks — was not going to be trusted about Rhode Island.
Prefer .org, and prefer named institutions
Legal aid organizations, state law libraries and bar associations. Check the organization actually exists.