Every California rental unit signed, renewed, or amended after January 1, 2026 must include a working stove and refrigerator to meet the state's habitability standard, under Assembly Bill 628. A unit missing either appliance, or running one that no longer works safely, is now legally uninhabitable rather than simply under furnished.
The law amends Civil Code Section 1941.1, which previously addressed weatherproofing, plumbing, heating, and utilities but stopped short of naming kitchen appliances directly. AB 628 closes that gap by putting a functioning stove and refrigerator on the same legal footing as a working furnace or a sealed roof. Recalled appliances get a defined grace period too: landlords have 30 days from notice of a recall to repair or replace the unit.
What This Means for Turnover Timing
For any unit turning over after the effective date, the standard walkthrough checklist just gained a fixed item. A move out inspection that previously treated a working stove as a nice to have now has to confirm it as a compliance requirement before the unit can legally go back on the market. A refrigerator that's aging out or a stove with a pilot light issue, the kind of thing that used to sit on a list of eventual replacements, now has to move to the front of the turnover punch list, because re letting the unit without addressing it creates immediate habitability exposure.
There's one narrow exception. A landlord and tenant can agree in writing that the tenant supplies their own refrigerator, and once that's documented in the lease, the landlord isn't responsible for maintaining or replacing it. Without that written agreement, the default assumption runs the other way: the landlord owns the obligation. That makes lease language, not just the physical appliance, part of what a turnover has to get right.
Building the Requirement Into Make Ready Work
Coordinating turnovers across Ventura County and Sacramento means the appliance check now sits alongside paint, flooring, and lock changes as a standard line item rather than an optional add on. Standardising on a small set of stove and refrigerator models across a portfolio, documenting condition with dated photos at every turn, and flagging tenant supplied appliance agreements in the file all reduce the chance a unit gets re let with a habitability gap nobody caught. It's a small addition to a make ready checklist that already covers dozens of items, but one with real legal weight attached.
AB 628 turns something landlords used to treat as a courtesy into a fixed part of what makes a rental legal to occupy. Portfolios that fold it into the standard turnover process now avoid finding out the hard way during a habitability dispute later, and it costs far less to catch a dead refrigerator on a pre turnover checklist than to catch it from a tenant complaint after the lease is already signed.
