Owner-Occupancy Requirement
Owner-occupancy rules require the property owner to live on site. California suspended this requirement for standard ADUs permitted on or after January 1, 2020 — so you can rent both the main house and the ADU. Junior ADUs are the exception: a JADU still requires the owner to occupy either the main house or the JADU.
The suspension is a major reason investors can build ADUs purely for rental income. Always confirm the rule with your jurisdiction, as a few cities (e.g., Davis for JADUs) apply it differently. For a Sacramento-region investor this is the rule that makes a pure rental play work: build a detached or attached ADU permitted after January 1, 2020, and you can lease the main house and the unit to separate tenants without living on site. The carve-out is the Junior ADU — a JADU still ties at least one of the two dwellings to the owner — so an investor who wants both units fully rentable should choose a standard ADU rather than a JADU.
Go deeper:Sacramento ADU rules & permits
Related terms
Back to the ADU glossary.