TL;DR: New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed the FAIR Act on July 20, 2026, making New Jersey the fourth state to ban algorithmic rent-pricing software that pools nonpublic competitor data. The law (P.L.2026, c.43) takes effect July 1, 2027 -- giving landlords one year to audit their property management software. Three days later, Sherrill also signed the Fair Price Protection Act banning surveillance pricing on groceries. Together the two laws represent the most aggressive state-level AI pricing crackdown in the US this summer.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed the Forbidding the Algorithmic Inflation of Rent (FAIR) Act into law on July 20, 2026, at a ceremony in Newark's Military Park. The law, enacted as P.L.2026, c.43, makes New Jersey the fourth state to ban rent-setting software that pools nonpublic, competitively sensitive data from competing landlords to generate coordinated pricing recommendations.
"Landlords, who should be competing to provide the best price to renters, are instead colluding to drive prices up through so-called 'algorithmic pricing,'" Sherrill said at the signing. "That stops now."
The law takes effect July 1, 2027, giving landlords and property managers roughly one year to audit their pricing software and remove any tools that facilitate coordination across competing owners.
What Triggered the FAIR Act
The push against rent-setting algorithms started in courtrooms, not statehouses. Beginning in 2022, renters filed class-action lawsuits accusing RealPage and dozens of major landlords of using the company's YieldStar and AIRM software to coordinate rent increases rather than compete on price.
The lawsuits argued that RealPage's model -- aggregating confidential occupancy rates, lease termination dates, and pricing data from competing properties, then generating pricing recommendations that each landlord followed -- produced collusion by algorithm rather than competition. Courts did not require landlords to have explicitly agreed to fix prices. The shared data and shared recommendations were enough to raise antitrust concerns.
The legal pressure produced real settlements. Greystar, the nation's largest landlord, and 25 other property firms paid more than $141 million collectively to settle a class action. The US Department of Justice sued RealPage and six large landlords in 2024; RealPage settled along with Greystar, LivCor, and Cortland Management. Willow Bridge also settled separately.
The DOJ's consent decree with RealPage (November 2025), filed under the Tunney Act, bars the company from using competitors' active lease data in runtime pricing recommendations and from conducting market surveys to collect competitively sensitive information. The FAIR Act writes the same prohibition into New Jersey state law -- extending it to every landlord and every software vendor operating in New Jersey, not just the parties to the federal settlement.
NJ Attorney General Matthew Platkin had already filed a separate antitrust suit against RealPage and 10 of the state's largest landlords before the FAIR Act passed. That ongoing litigation built part of the political case for the legislation.
What the FAIR Act Prohibits
The law targets a specific mechanism: using software that pools nonpublic data from competing landlords to generate pricing recommendations.
The operative prohibition is on using "shared nonpublic competitor data" in an algorithmic pricing tool's output, not on using algorithms for pricing generally. A landlord who uses a pricing model trained solely on historical, publicly available, time-aged market data -- published rent surveys, public listing databases, general economic indicators -- does not trigger the FAIR Act's prohibition.
What is prohibited:
- Using revenue management software that ingests nonpublic occupancy rates, lease expiration dates, or rental pricing data from competing properties
- Receiving algorithmic pricing recommendations generated from a pooled dataset that includes competitors' confidential information
- Participating in data-sharing arrangements with software providers if that sharing enables coordinated pricing recommendations
What is not prohibited:
- Using pricing tools that rely on public data sources
- Adjusting rents based on your own property's performance data
- Using ordinary spreadsheets, internal dashboards, or general market benchmarks
- Subscribing to publicly available rent estimate databases
The law requires the NJ Attorney General to establish an online portal where renters can report suspected violations. The portal provides a formal intake mechanism for complaints that the AG can investigate and, if warranted, pursue as antitrust violations under state law. Penalties track the NJ Antitrust Act -- which does not cap fines but can include injunctions, civil penalties, and disgorgement.
The FAIR Act also preempts local governments from adopting conflicting rules. Jersey City had passed a similar local ordinance in May 2025; the state law supersedes inconsistent local approaches and establishes a uniform standard across New Jersey.
The Multi-State Cluster
New Jersey did not act alone. Four states have now enacted algorithmic rent pricing bans: New York, Connecticut, Illinois, and New Jersey. Each draws the line at the same structural point: coordinated pricing using nonpublic competitor data is anticompetitive regardless of whether landlords explicitly agreed to fix prices.
City-level bans predated the state wave. San Francisco, Philadelphia, Jersey City, Minneapolis, San Diego, and Hoboken all enacted local algorithmic rent pricing restrictions before state legislatures acted. The NJ FAIR Act's preemption clause resolves any ambiguity between those local ordinances and the new state framework by establishing the state standard as controlling.
The DOJ consent decree's operational line -- current, identifiable, nonpublic competitor data triggers liability; historical, aggregated, publicly available data does not -- has become the functional definition that state laws are adopting. The FAIR Act follows the same structure.
For property management software vendors selling into multiple states, the four-state cluster creates a de facto national standard for any platform that wants to operate across major rental markets without maintaining separate compliant and noncompliant versions of its product.
The Fair Price Protection Act: Three Days Later
On July 23, 2026 -- three days after signing the FAIR Act -- Sherrill signed the Fair Price Protection Act, making New Jersey the third state to ban surveillance pricing on groceries and necessities.
The Fair Price Protection Act prohibits retailers and third-party delivery platforms from using personal data (browsing history, real-time location, purchase behavior, demographic inferences) to charge individual shoppers higher prices than other customers for identical products. It applies to in-store, online, and delivery purchases.
New Jersey's law differs from Maryland's and Connecticut's surveillance pricing laws in one significant way: it includes a private right of action. Any NJ shopper who can demonstrate they were charged more because of their personal data can file a civil suit without waiting for the Attorney General to act. If a court finds the defendant acted willfully, the consumer can recover treble damages -- three times the actual harm. That makes the law viable for class actions aggregating individually small overcharges into collective liability proportional to the full scope of a pricing program.
The Fair Price Protection Act takes effect February 1, 2027. It also places a one-year moratorium on new electronic shelf label (ESL) installations in New Jersey while the NJ Innovation Authority studies the technology's surveillance capabilities. Existing ESLs can continue operating; only new deployments are paused.
Together, the two laws reflect a consistent policy posture from the Sherrill administration: AI pricing tools are subject to antitrust and consumer protection law when they use data -- whether competitor data or customer data -- to extract more money from renters and shoppers than competition would produce.
Compliance Checklist for Landlords and Property Managers
If your organization uses algorithmic pricing for rental properties in New Jersey, or if your software vendor serves the NJ market, these are the immediate steps:
1. Audit your current pricing software. Ask your vendor whether their pricing recommendations incorporate nonpublic data from competing properties. If the answer is yes -- or if they cannot tell you definitively -- treat the tool as potentially noncompliant with the FAIR Act.
2. Request a data lineage explanation from your vendor. You need to know: what data sources feed the pricing algorithm, whether any of those sources include nonpublic information from competing landlords, and how recommendations are generated. Put the request in writing.
3. Check whether your vendor has modified its product since the DOJ consent decree. Vendors that serve the NJ market should have already adapted their data pipelines to exclude competitors' active lease data in response to the November 2025 federal settlement. If your vendor has not, that is a FAIR Act compliance gap.
4. Review data-sharing agreements. Some pricing platforms operate through data consortia where landlords contribute their own occupancy and pricing data in exchange for market recommendations. If you participate in such an arrangement, review whether what you contribute becomes part of the pooled data that generates recommendations for competing landlords. That pooling mechanism is exactly what the FAIR Act prohibits.
5. Document the public data sources your pricing uses. If your pricing tool relies on published rent surveys, public listing databases, or general economic indicators, document those sources now. That documentation is your compliance record if the AG receives a complaint about your property.
6. Set a July 1, 2027 internal deadline. One year sounds like a long runway, but switching or reconfiguring enterprise property management software takes time. Start vendor conversations now rather than in Q1 2027.
7. Monitor the NJ AG renter reporting portal. Once established, the portal will be the primary intake mechanism for FAIR Act complaints. Knowing what is being reported in your market will help you assess enforcement risk.
What Comes Next
The NJ AG's ongoing lawsuit against RealPage and 10 NJ landlords proceeds independently of the FAIR Act. The legislation does not create a private right of action for renters (unlike the Fair Price Protection Act, which gives grocery shoppers individual standing). Enforcement of the rent pricing ban runs through the AG's office under the NJ Antitrust Act.
The four-state cluster is not static. New York had already enacted its algorithmic rent pricing ban before New Jersey; California has had similar proposals in prior sessions. The national picture of algorithmic pricing regulation is moving faster than federal preemption proposals can respond -- three congressional attempts to freeze state AI legislation have failed, and the DOJ's AI Litigation Task Force has challenged state AI laws in other contexts but has not targeted algorithmic pricing legislation.
Landlords operating in NJ, NY, CT, and IL already face a patchwork of overlapping prohibitions. As the cluster grows, maintaining separate legal analysis for each state becomes impractical. The more durable compliance posture is to remove nonpublic competitor data from pricing models entirely -- which is what the DOJ consent decree required of RealPage and what the multi-state legislation requires of the market.
