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Published July 15, 2026
Four new state ADU bills signed October 2025 bring faster permits, looser JADU rules, and a 60 day cap on coastal permits.
Four new accessory dwelling unit bills were signed by Governor Newsom in October 2025. AB 1154, SB 543, and SB 9 took effect January 1, 2026, and AB 462 took effect immediately on October 15, 2025 as an urgency statute. Together they loosen JADU owner occupancy rules, cap local permit review at 15 business days for completeness and 60 days for coastal permits, and force cities to keep their ADU ordinances in line with state law or lose them entirely.
California has been amending its ADU statutes almost every year since 2016, and each round closes gaps that local agencies used to slow projects down. This year's batch does the same thing from four different angles: unit design, unit size and fees, permit enforcement, and coastal review. If you own rental property anywhere in the South Bay, from El Segundo to the beach cities, at least one of these bills touches your next ADU project.
AB 1154 amends Government Code section 66333 so that the owner occupancy requirement for a junior accessory dwelling unit applies only when the JADU shares sanitation facilities, meaning a bathroom, with the main house. If your JADU has its own bathroom, you no longer have to live on the property to rent it out. The tradeoff: JADUs can no longer be rented short term. Every JADU rental term must run 30 days or longer, and a JADU still has to sit within the existing walls of the home, keep a separate entrance, and include an efficient kitchen.
SB 543 cleans up ADU and JADU sizing rules by defining allowable square footage as interior livable space, and it caps a JADU at 500 square feet of interior livable space. It also expands the fee exemption: ADUs and JADUs with less than 500 square feet of interior livable space are exempt from school impact fees, on top of the existing exemption from other impact fees for ADUs with 750 square feet or less of interior livable space, now found at Government Code section 66311.5 (renumbered from section 66324 by SB 543). SB 543 also tightens permit processing: a local agency must determine whether an ADU application is complete within 15 business days, or the application is deemed complete as submitted. And it confirms the fire sprinkler exemption, so an ADU cannot be required to install sprinklers if the primary residence is not required to have them.
Do not confuse this with the 2021 lot split and duplex law, also called SB 9. This is a separate 2025 bill, authored by Senator Arreguín, that targets cities dragging their feet on ADU compliance. Under this SB 9, a local agency must submit its ADU ordinance to the Department of Housing and Community Development within 60 days of adoption. If it misses that deadline, or fails to respond to HCD findings that the ordinance does not comply with state law within 30 days, the local ordinance becomes null and void and the state's default ADU standards apply instead. For owners, this means a noncompliant city cannot use its own restrictive local rules to block or slow your project; the state standard takes over automatically.
This is the one that matters most if you own property in Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, or any other coastal zone city, and it is already in force: AB 462 took effect October 15, 2025 as an urgency statute. It requires a local agency or the California Coastal Commission to approve or deny a coastal development permit for an ADU within 60 days of a complete application, running concurrently with the ministerial land use review rather than after it. If no decision comes within 60 days, the application is deemed approved. The bill also eliminates the ability to appeal an ADU coastal development permit to the Coastal Commission, which used to be a major source of delay. Before AB 462, industry estimates put average coastal ADU permitting at five to eight months, with appeals capable of adding six months or more. AB 462 also lets a damaged home's ADU get its own certificate of occupancy in a declared disaster area, even before the main house is rebuilt, a provision written in response to the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires.
If you have been sitting on an ADU or JADU project because of owner occupancy rules, permit delays, or fear of a Coastal Commission appeal, the legal landscape got meaningfully friendlier on January 1, 2026. A JADU with its own bathroom can now be a straightforward rental unit. A coastal ADU has a real deadline attached to its permit. And a city that tries to enforce an outdated local ordinance may find that ordinance has no legal force at all. None of this replaces good project planning, accurate cost estimates, or a lender conversation, but the regulatory friction that used to eat up a year of a project's timeline is genuinely smaller now.
If you would rather not track every legislative session for the next rule change, that is part of what we do for our owners.
This is general information, not legal or tax advice. Confirm with a licensed professional before you act.
Last verified: July 2026.
Topics: compliance, ADU, California housing law, South Bay, landlord compliance
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Schofield Properties is a family run property management company at 323 Richmond St, El Segundo, CA 90245. We have managed the South Bay since 1972 and personally oversee about 186 doors today. Book a call to talk about your property.
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