The State Council's housing lease regulation took effect on 15 September 2025, the first national law on renting. It requires the deposit's return deadline and deduction cases to be written into the contract, bars agencies from holding your money, and rules that a balcony is never a bedroom. No nationality or visa category is barred from renting.
the first thing to know about renting in china is that the rules moved underneath every older blog post. on 15 september 2025 the state council's housing lease regulation took effect, the first national law written specifically about renting a home. it runs to 7 chapters and 50 articles, and several of them settle disputes that used to depend on which city you argued in: landlords must show proof they are entitled to rent the place out, agencies are barred from collecting your rent or deposit, and kitchens, balconies and basements cannot be rented out as bedrooms. checked against the regulation text in the justice ministry's national regulations database, 19 october 2026.
this page walks the whole loop: whether your visa lets you sign at all, what a fair rent looks like in 2026, what the contract and the money flow should contain, the police registration you have 24 hours to complete after moving in, and where to turn when a deposit fight starts. it assumes you are settling in for a stay measured in months; if you are still packing, the pre-departure checklist and the cost of living guide cover the shorter horizon.
Who can sign a lease
an old claim on expat forums says you need a work visa or a residence permit to rent, no exceptions. the law says something narrower. no chinese statute makes renting conditional on visa category; what constrains you is time. a lease is a contract measured in months, and a 30-day visa-free stay cannot honestly carry a 12-month term, so landlords screen applicants rather than law forbidding the deal. what they typically ask for, as market practice rather than legal requirement: your passport, a visa or residence permit, and sometimes a work contract or employer letter.
the 2025 regulation runs the identity check in both directions. article 9 obliges the landlord to show you their identity document and the property ownership certificate before signing, to verify your passport in turn, and not to enter the apartment without your consent. two consequences worth noting: asking to see the deed is not rude, it is the statutory way to tell a real landlord from a tenant quietly subletting or a scammer with copied keys; and once you have signed, the landlord cannot walk in on you.
on the tourist-visa question specifically, renting is not a legal problem, it is a matching problem. short-stay options exist: serviced apartments, monthly sublets and hotel-apartment hybrids all rent by the month to visitors on any status. what you should not do is sign a year-long lease you plan to leave after six weeks, because the deposit return terms you are about to read are only as good as the contract you wrote.
What the 2025 regulation changed
before september 2025, renting disputes ran through a patchwork of city rules and contract law. the regulation (state council decree no. 812) set a national floor. the articles a tenant actually uses:
| article | what it says | why it matters to you |
|---|---|---|
| art. 7 | kitchens, bathrooms, balconies, corridors, basements and garages may not be rented out as separate living space | "cozy balcony room" listings are illegal conversions; individuals breaking this face fines of RMB¥2,000 to RMB¥10,000 (art. 39) |
| art. 8 | landlords must file the lease (beian) with the housing authority; filing is free, and if the landlord does not do it, the tenant can file themselves | you are not hostage to a lazy landlord; the filing costs nothing either way |
| art. 9 | landlord shows identity and ownership documents, verifies yours, and may not enter without consent | the deed check is your scam filter; your privacy is written law |
| art. 10 | deposit amount, return timing and deduction cases must be written into the contract; no deductions outside the agreed cases without proper reason | the deposit fight is won or lost at the drafting table, not at move-out |
| art. 12 | termination requires notice and a reasonable move-out window; violence, threats or other illegal means to force you out are banned | cutting water or power to evict you is illegal, not a negotiation tactic |
| art. 19 | long-term rental companies must route money through a publicized, supervised fund account | the "long-rental operator runs off with a year of prepaid rent" failure mode now has a legal brake |
| art. 25 / 26 | agencies may not collect or pay rent and deposit for either side; agency fees must be listed openly with no unlisted extras | your money goes to the landlord's account, never the agent's |
| art. 37 | landlords must register tenant and actual occupant information with authorities | the landlord's reporting duty is separate from your own police registration below |
one thing the regulation deliberately does not do: it sets no national deadline for returning a deposit. it requires the deadline to be in the contract. guides that promise "your deposit back within 7 days by law" are describing a city rule at most, not the national law. the protective move is to write the number in yourself before signing.
Where listings live and what rent runs
the practical channels, all of them market practice rather than official endorsement: beike and lianjia list agency-mediated flats with real photos and mostly honest floor plans; ziroom rents standardized rooms in shared or whole apartments on a company lease; anjuke and 58.com carry everything including the scams, so treat them as a survey tool rather than a place to wire money; and direct-rent listings circulate on douban groups, xiaohongshu and city wechat groups, where you deal with the landlord and skip the agency fee.
as for price levels, two reference points with different pedigrees. the official one: the national bureau of statistics put the housing component of consumer prices at minus 0.3 percent year on year in september 2026, in other words rents nationwide are flat to drifting down. the commercial one: the china index academy, a private research house, measured shanghai at RMB¥84.39 per square meter per month and shenzhen at RMB¥83.05 in august 2026, with first-tier cities up a cumulative 1.21 percent over the first eight months of the year. run the arithmetic and a 60 square meter one-bedroom in either city lands around RMB¥5,000 a month; provincial capitals and second-tier cities run noticeably below that. shenzhen even publishes an official reference-rent lookup by residential compound through its housing bureau, useful for checking whether a specific listing is priced sane.
a cheap headline rent deserves a second look before it deserves a signature. two patterns account for most of the too-good listings: converted space (the balcony bedroom of article 7) and commercial-title apartments, which the next section prices out.
Reading the contract and the money
china's market regulator publishes an official model lease, contract template GF-2025-2614 (april 2025 edition), which agencies and landlords adapt. it is worth knowing the baseline it encodes: lease terms cannot exceed 20 years (civil code article 705, anything beyond is void), and both parties should complete the lease filing. most real contracts you will see are shorter and denser. the lines to actually read:
- the deposit clause. amount, return deadline, and the exact cases where deductions are allowed. article 10 of the regulation makes these mandatory contract content, so refusing to write them down is itself a signal.
- the payment schedule. the common arrangement is "one month deposit, three months rent at a time" (ya yi fu san). paying a full year upfront to a private landlord buys you nothing except exposure.
- the agency fee. commonly one month's rent, often split between landlord and tenant in beijing and shanghai, sometimes paid wholly by the landlord elsewhere. the regulation requires agencies to list their fees openly (art. 26), and forbids them from touching your rent or deposit at all (art. 25). every yuan you pay should reach the landlord's account or the agency's listed fee, never an agent's personal wechat.
- the utility line. which tariff the unit carries: residential or commercial.
the utility line sounds trivial until you price it. beijing's official residential electricity rate starts at RMB¥0.4883 per kWh for the first 240 kWh a month, while general commercial supply runs RMB¥0.8745 at the flat rate and RMB¥1.4002 at peak, roughly 1.8 times residential. apartments with commercial titles (shang-zhu gongyu) advertise rents maybe 15 to 20 percent under comparable residential flats, then bill electricity at the commercial rate, and a household running air conditioning year-round can pay over a thousand yuan a year extra for it. ask which tariff applies before you compare rents.
The 24-hour registration clock
the rule newcomers miss is not in the lease at all. under article 39(2) of the exit and entry administration law, a foreigner staying anywhere other than a hotel must register residence with the local public security within 24 hours of arrival, either in person or through the person hosting them. hotels do it automatically at check-in; a rented apartment does not. skipping it is a warning and a fine of up to RMB¥2,000 under article 76, and the registration receipt is paperwork you will want for residence permits, bank accounts and some phone contracts anyway.
the errand itself got easier in 2026. since 21 september 2026 the national immigration administration has offered online registration nationwide, through its government service website, the 12367 app, and wechat or alipay mini programs; an online filing carries the same effect as showing up at a station window, and the offline channels still exist. who files depends on where you sleep: if you are staying in someone's home, the host registers for you; if it is your own tenancy, you can register yourself with your passport and the lease contract. official guidance for foreign residents puts the urban deadline at 24 hours and the rural one at 72.
bring two things either way: your passport and the lease contract (or the landlord's property certificate). and note the division of labor: article 37 of the lease regulation makes the landlord report your tenancy to the authorities, but that is their paperwork, not yours. it does not complete your registration, and "the landlord already reported it" has never been an accepted excuse at a checkpoint.
What move-in day costs
quoted monthly rent understates the cash you need on signing day. on the standard arrangement:
| item | typical amount | notes |
|---|---|---|
| deposit | 1 month's rent | refundable; return deadline must be written into the contract (art. 10) |
| first rent payment | 3 months' rent | the "ya yi fu san" pattern; monthly payment exists but usually prices in a premium |
| agency fee | up to 1 month's rent | often split with the landlord in beijing and shanghai; the listed fee only (art. 26) |
| lease filing | RMB¥0 | the regulation bars charging for the filing (art. 8); anyone asking for a filing fee is inventing it |
worked example at RMB¥5,000 monthly rent: RMB¥5,000 deposit plus RMB¥15,000 rent plus a RMB¥2,500 half-agency fee comes to RMB¥22,500 before you have slept a single night in the place. budget against the day-one total, not the monthly number, and compare the city cost picture when choosing between two offers.
When it goes wrong
the deposit is where most tenancies end badly, so run it on rails from day one. photograph every wall and every meter reading at move-in, keep payment records, and keep a copy of the signed contract. at move-out, the deduction cases are the ones article 10 made you write down; anything outside them is not withholdable "for proper reason". if the landlord simply refuses, article 35 of the regulation lays out the ladder: negotiation, then mediation, arbitration or litigation. foreign plaintiffs do win deposit cases in chinese courts; what wins them is the paper trail, not the accent.
the money-flow rules exist because two failure modes were common enough to legislate. first, agencies collecting rent and deposits and then vanishing: since art. 25 an agency doing this is acting illegally, so any request to pay rent into an agent's personal account should end the conversation. second, long-term rental operators taking a year of prepaid rent and collapsing: art. 19 requires them to run money through a publicized supervised account, with fines from RMB¥20,000 to RMB¥100,000, rising to RMB¥500,000 for refusers. paying only into that published account is the whole defense.
and if the dispute turns hostile, know where the law already stands: cutting water or power, changing the locks, or threats to force you out are banned by article 12. call 110 for an immediate confrontation, and lean on the regulation text (it is public, in the justice ministry's database) rather than argument volume. for the wider picture of staying safe as a foreigner, the safety guide keeps the same evidence-first method, and once you are settled, the bank account guide picks up where the lease leaves off.
Common questions
Can a foreigner rent an apartment in China?
yes. no law restricts renting by nationality or visa category. landlords will ask for your passport (they are required to verify it under art. 9 of the lease regulation) and usually a visa or residence permit, and screening for lease length is market practice, not a legal bar.
Can I rent an apartment in China on a tourist visa?
nothing in the law forbids it, but a 30-day stay does not match a 12-month lease, so realistic options are monthly serviced apartments, sublets and hotel-apartment hybrids. the constraint is duration matching, not rental eligibility, and skipping your police registration is a separate matter with its own fine.
How much is the deposit for an apartment in China?
the common pattern is one month's rent, sometimes two for shared flats or tenants without local income. the amount itself is negotiable, but once charged, its return deadline and deduction cases must be written into the contract by article 10 of the regulation.
How long does a landlord have to return the deposit?
china's national lease regulation sets no fixed deadline. it requires the deadline to be in the contract, and forbids deductions outside the agreed cases. the "7 days by law" claim in older guides does not come from national law. write the number into the lease before signing; 7 to 15 days after move-out is a common agreed term.
Do I have to register with the police after renting in China?
yes. foreigners living anywhere other than a hotel must register within 24 hours of moving in (72 hours in rural areas), under article 39 of the exit and entry administration law. skipping it can bring a warning and a fine of up to RMB¥2,000. your landlord's separate duty to report the tenancy does not count as your registration.
How do I register my address online?
since 21 september 2026 the national immigration administration accepts online registration nationwide: its service website, the 12367 app, and wechat or alipay mini programs. online filings equal in-person ones. you will need your passport and lease contract, and if you live in someone else's home, the host files for you.
What is lease filing (beian) and do I need to do it?
the landlord must file the signed lease with the local housing authority, free of charge. if the landlord does not, the tenant can file it themselves under article 8. it is not optional paperwork in principle, and it is never something anyone should charge you for.
Why is one apartment cheaper but with higher utility bills?
it likely has a commercial title. commercial-titled apartments (shang-zhu gongyu) rent below comparable residential flats but bill utilities at commercial tariffs; in beijing the residential rate starts at RMB¥0.4883 per kWh against RMB¥0.8745 for general commercial supply, about 1.8 times. ask which tariff applies and do the annual arithmetic before the lower rent charms you.
Should I rent without an agency?
direct deals with a landlord save the agency fee and work fine when you verify ownership: ask for the property certificate and ID before paying anything, both of which article 9 entitles you to see. the regulation's money rules also cut both ways in your favor: an agency may not handle your rent or deposit, so in a direct deal nobody legitimately stands between you and the landlord's account anyway.