The Zoning Reform Scorecard 2026: Grading All 50 States on What You Can Actually Draw

In April 2025, Realtor.com handed out report cards to the fifty states and gave exactly one of them an A. It was South Carolina. The state builds a great deal and sells it cheaply, and by the only yardsticks that ranking used, affordability and construction volume, it deserved the grade. Then look at what the South Carolina General Assembly has actually done to its land-use code in the last two years. Nothing of consequence. No parking reform, no lot-size reform, no accessory-dwelling law, no permit shot clock. A developer's engineer drawing a site plan in Greenville today works under the same municipal rulebook as in 2019.

That gap, between a state that builds and a state that has changed the rules of building, is the reason for this scorecard. Plenty of people now rank states on housing. Realtor.com grades outcomes. The AEI Housing Center scores bills against its own menu of preferred reforms. Mercatus counts legislation and crowns valedictorians; its tally of 412 pro-housing bills introduced in the 2025 cycle, up from 263 the year before, is the number everyone now quotes. Pew writes the narrative. None of them ask the question that matters to the people who draw the drawings. When a statute passes, what changes on the sheet?

We grade from the site plan outward. A law earns credit here when it moves a dimension a planner, a civil engineer or a surveyor has to honor: the minimum lot, the setback, the height, the units per acre, the parking count, the number of days a reviewer has before the clock runs out. A law that merely encourages cities to do better earns little. A law that mandates and then enforces earns a lot. By that measure the country sorts cleanly, and not along the lines most readers expect.

Four states earn an A. Two of them, Washington and California, are run by Democrats; the other two, Texas and Montana, by Republicans. Roughly thirty states earn a D or an F, and most of them are in the South, the Plains and the Mountain West, the very places that build the most. The scorecard is not a measure of whether housing gets built. It is a measure of whether the state has done anything to let it be built differently, on smaller lots, closer together, with fewer stalls and faster permits.

The year's real story, though, is not density. It is procedure. The states that moved in 2026 mostly did not legalize more units. They shortened review windows, locked in the rules at application, abolished minimum parking counts and capped fees. Georgia now gives a reviewer 45 days. Maryland now freezes the code the day a complete application lands. North Carolina will stop requiring any parking at all outside its coastal counties on January 1, 2027. These are not glamorous reforms. They are the ones that change a drawing.

How the grades work

Each state starts at zero and can earn 100 points across five questions. We publish the rubric so that anyone, YIMBY or municipal league, can rescore a state and argue with us.

A score of 85 or above is an A, 70 to 84 a B, 55 to 69 a C, 40 to 54 a D, and anything lower an F. Grades are as of October 16, 2026. Where a state's position depends on a pending event, a ballot question or a court ruling, we say so.

Two rules of evidence. First, we count only enacted law, not bills that passed one chamber or died in conference. Indiana's 2026 housing bill is graded on what survived, not on what its sponsors introduced. Second, where a state's own agencies or courts have produced numbers, we use those over advocacy counts, and we say when a number is a pipeline rather than a completion. The oft-repeated Texas figure of 8,488 units attributed to Senate Bill 840, for instance, does not appear in the report that supposedly produced it; the July 2026 study by the AEI Housing Center, Texas Appleseed and Texans for Reasonable Solutions counts 8,764 units, of which 1,529 were proposed or approved directly under the statute and 7,235 were "indirectly supported" through rezonings the law did not authorize. We use the smaller number.

The A states

Washington (A). No state has changed more dimensions on more plans. House Bill 1110, passed in 2023, requires four units per lot in cities of 75,000 or more, six near major transit, and two units per lot in cities between 25,000 and 75,000. It reaches 77 of the state's 281 municipalities, according to the Department of Commerce. In 2025 the legislature went after parking with Senate Bill 5184, capping what a city may demand at half a space per apartment and one per house, and nothing at all for homes under 1,200 square feet. It added transit zoning with HB 1491, and in March 2026 Gov. Bob Ferguson signed HB 2418 to speed permitting for the housing those laws allow. The Puget Sound Regional Council's April 2026 survey found that 84 percent of responding central Puget Sound jurisdictions had already written middle-housing rules into their codes. That figure is regional, not statewide, but it is the best implementation data any state has produced.

California (A). Senate Bill 79 took effect on July 1, 2026, and it is the most dimensionally specific upzoning law in the country. Within a quarter mile of a heavy-rail stop in one of the state's eight urban transit counties, a city must allow at least 75 feet of height, 120 units per acre and a floor-area ratio of 3.5. Between a quarter and a half mile the floor drops to 65 feet and 100 units; lesser transit tiers step down to 55 feet and 80 units. Sites adjacent to the stop get another 20 feet. Average unit size is capped at 1,750 square feet so the law cannot be satisfied with penthouses. Cities are already testing the edges. San Francisco labeled nearly 1,900 parcels in SoMa, Bayview and Bayshore as "industrial employment hubs" to keep them out; YIMBY Law sued on July 31. Los Angeles adopted an ordinance in June that pauses SB 79 on qualifying sites until about 2030. Then on September 29 and 30 Gov. Gavin Newsom signed another wave: AB 1751 creates a ministerial, CEQA-exempt path for townhome projects of up to 150 units with an optional 60-day approval track, and AB 2074 orders the seven largest cities to draw downtown transit-hub districts by July 2027. Both take effect January 1, 2027. The state gets an A because the floors are written in feet and units, and because someone is in court enforcing them.

Texas (A−). Texas did in one session what California took a decade to do, and it did so without a single Democratic governor. Senate Bill 840, effective September 1, 2025, lets a developer build apartments by right on office, retail and warehouse land in the 19 cities with more than 150,000 residents in counties of 300,000 or more. The statute sets the floor itself: at least 45 feet of height or whatever the commercial district allows, at least 36 units per acre, no floor-area cap, no more than one parking space per unit, no traffic study, no impact fee, no parkland dedication. Senate Bill 15 does the same for subdivisions, forbidding large cities from requiring lots bigger than 3,000 square feet, wider than 30 feet or deeper than 75 in new subdivisions of five acres or more, with setbacks capped at 15 feet in front, 10 in back and 5 on the sides. In Dallas, a 40-unit building at 6235 Oram Street is going up at four stories on a site the city had capped at 36 feet. In Plano, a council member admitted that part of the reason to approve a 2,342-unit rezoning was that the applicant "could otherwise return under SB 840, where the Council would have less influence." The minus is for the pushback. Arlington now requires six-story minimums for apartments in commercial districts. Irving and Grand Prairie layered on rules that lawyers at Winstead say "materially impair the feasibility" of SB 840 projects. The legislature does not meet again in regular session until 2027, so none of that can be fixed soon.

Montana (A−). The so-called Montana Miracle of 2023, duplexes in every city over 5,000 people, ADUs by right, apartments on commercial land, survived its last legal test on March 17, 2026, when the state Supreme Court unanimously upheld all of it in Montanans Against Irresponsible Densification v. State. The 2025 session added a parking cap of one space per unit, single-stair buildings up to six stories, and impact-fee limits. Pacific Legal Foundation's lawyer summed up the ruling in a sentence that will be quoted at town meetings for years: "There is no constitutional right to block your neighbors from building homes that comply with the law." The minus is for results on the ground. Missoula permitted only 587 units in 2025, and one land-use planner there described an 88 percent drop in approvals. A reform can be right and still arrive in a bad year for interest rates.

Oregon (A−). House Bill 2001 of 2019 was the first statewide middle-housing mandate, and it has had six years to work. The legislature expanded it in 2025 with HB 2138 and sent technical fixes into effect this January. Middle housing has risen from roughly 8 to 11 percent of permits across the 45 covered cities, by one secondary tally. The grade is high on breadth and mandate and a little lower on momentum, because the 2026 short session passed nothing new.

The B states

Massachusetts (B+, pending November 3). The state's lever is the MBTA Communities Act, which requires 177 towns served by transit to zone at least one district for multifamily housing by right. It does not require a single building. What it has required is obedience, and the state has been willing to go get it. On January 29, 2026, Attorney General Andrea Campbell sued nine holdout towns, Dracut, East Bridgewater, Halifax, Holden, Marblehead, Middleton, Tewksbury, Wilmington and Winthrop. "The lawsuit is essentially the hammer," she said, "and we don't start with the hammer." On September 18 the Supreme Judicial Court upheld the law unanimously for a second time, in a challenge brought by Marshfield. Then there is Question 7, on the ballot in two weeks. It would let anyone build a single-family house without a special permit on a lot of 5,000 square feet or more with public water and sewer. A Beacon Research poll in August found 67 percent in favor. Tufts University's Center for State Policy Analysis estimates it would yield about 750 homes a year, a 15 percent bump in single-family construction and not much more. If it passes, Massachusetts moves to A−, because for the first time a dimension, 5,000 square feet, would be written into state law.

Colorado (B+, contested). The 2024 laws are among the strongest in the country on paper: 40 units per acre near transit under HB24-1313, parking minimums abolished near transit under HB24-1304, ADUs by right. In 2026 Gov. Jared Polis signed HB 26-1001, opening nonprofit, school and transit land to housing. What holds the grade down is that six cities, Arvada, Aurora, Glendale, Greenwood Village, Lafayette and Westminster, sued the state in Denver District Court on May 19, 2025, and seventeen months later there is no reported ruling. Greenwood Village's complaint argues the transit mandate would require "development at levels that would more than triple" its housing stock. The state's reply has been money. Polis tied some $280 million across 34 grant programs to compliance, and the Department of Local Affairs listed ten non-compliant jurisdictions in October 2025. Transit-area housing reports are due December 31. Until a judge rules, Colorado is a strong law with an asterisk.

North Carolina (B+). The most underrated reformer of 2026, and the one that moved most on the drawing itself. Session Law 2026-39 forbids any local government outside the twenty coastal counties from requiring a minimum number of off-street parking spaces, starting January 1, 2027. The statute keeps one curious limit: the largest space a city may require is still 9 feet by 20. Session Law 2026-59, the Regulatory Reform Act, extends site-specific vesting from two years to five, requires cities of 50,000 or more to allow an ADU behind every detached house starting January 15, 2027, and bars them from capping ADUs below 800 square feet. Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, signed both. The House had passed the parking bill 117 to 0. A Wake County apartment that once needed 350 stalls can propose 275 and the town cannot demand the other 75.

Maryland (B). The Housing Certainty Act, signed May 26 and in force since October 1, does something no other state has done so plainly: it vests a project in the rules that exist the day a complete application is filed, for at least five years, and defers impact fees until construction is finished. The companion Transit and Housing Opportunity Act ends parking minimums for qualifying housing within a quarter mile of active rail and opens 300 acres of state land. Gov. Wes Moore explained the logic by asking a question: "Who is the largest landowner in the state of Maryland? It happens to be the state of Maryland."

Kansas (B). Senate Bill 418, signed by Gov. Laura Kelly on April 7 and effective July 1, is a by-right act for a red state. Cities must approve conforming single-family homes, townhomes and ADUs administratively within 30 days, must allow a 2,500-square-foot house on a 3,000-square-foot lot, and must accept a third-party inspection if their own inspector does not show up within 15 days. Overland Park's planning staff, drafting the implementing code in August, proposed 40-by-75-foot lots, setbacks of 15, 20 and 6 feet, and a garage no wider than two-thirds of the front façade, so that, as one planner put it, the house and not the garage faces the street. No subdivision has yet been filed under the law.

Maine (B+), New Hampshire (B), Arizona (B, provisional), Virginia (B−). Maine capped minimum lots at 5,000 square feet on sewer and 20,000 on septic in 2025 and allows three homes on a sewered lot. New Hampshire, under Gov. Kelly Ayotte, now bars towns from requiring more than one parking space per unit and allows ADUs statewide. Arizona's 2024 ADU and middle-housing laws stand, but Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a 2026 exactions bill, and the Starter Homes Act died again without a vote. Virginia's new ADU law, Senate Bill 531, caps permit fees at $500 and forbids stricter setbacks than for the main house, but it does not take effect until July 1, 2027, and its Faith in Housing Act, which lets congregations build affordable housing by right on land they have owned five years, starts January 1, 2027. Credit for passing it; less for the wait.

The C states and the shot-clock wave

The middle of the scorecard is where 2026's most distinctive idea lives. A handful of states, mostly Republican, declined to tell cities what to zone and instead told them how long they had to answer.

Georgia (C+). Senate Bill 447, sponsored by State Sen. Clint Dixon of Gwinnett County and signed by Gov. Brian Kemp on May 11, took effect July 1 as Act 513. A city now has five business days to say whether a land-disturbance application is complete, 45 days for a first review, 20 for a second and 14 for each one after that. Every deficiency must cite a specific code section, and nothing new may be raised on a third pass. Any government issuing more than 250 building permits a year must put a real-time permit dashboard online by January 1, 2028. "It puts a shot clock," Dixon told the Senate Rules Committee in February, "45 days for a municipality to turn around that permit." The House vote was 95 to 72, a reminder that counties did not love it. The grade is a C+ rather than higher because the law adds no unit anywhere; it only shortens the wait. What happens when a city misses the clock remains unsettled in the public summaries, so we do not describe a remedy.

Indiana (C). House Enrolled Act 1001 was introduced as a sweeping by-right bill and left the building as something smaller. Gov. Mike Braun signed it in March; it became Public Law 73. What survived is useful: a project is vested in the rules in force on the day it applies, permit-fee increases must wait 180 days after publication, fees after December 31 must be "reasonably necessary," and every locality must file an annual housing report starting in 2027. The statewide right to build duplexes and to put apartments on commercial land did not survive. Realtor.com's 2026 report card, published in June, ranked Indiana first in the nation for homebuilding and affordability. That is the South Carolina paradox again: a state that builds briskly under rules it barely touched.

Connecticut (C+). Gov. Ned Lamont vetoed the legislature's big housing bill in June 2025, then signed a narrower one, HB 8002, after a two-day special session in November. It replaces town affordable-housing plans with regional growth plans, ends parking mandates for developments of 16 units or fewer, and lets a commission demand no more than 110 percent of the parking a needs assessment shows. Much of it is opt-in. Connecticut's permits jumped 22.7 percent in 2025, the largest gain of any state, but that happened before the new law took effect and should not be credited to it.

Florida (B−), Idaho (B−), Utah (C+), Rhode Island (B−), Vermont (B−), Hawaii (C+). Florida's Live Local Act remains the broadest preemption in the South, and 2025 amendments made its parking reductions mandatory, but 2026 bills on lot size and ADUs died. Idaho's SB 1352, which passed the House 36 to 34, forbids cities from requiring lots larger than 1,500 square feet and requires setbacks that allow 12 units an acre; a companion bill makes ADUs by right and bars HOAs from blocking them. Utah preempted parking-space dimensions but not counts and let a starter-home bill die. Rhode Island's Shekarchi packages and Vermont's HOME Act are real but older, and neither legislature added much in 2026. Hawaii's 2024 ADU law depends on counties that have been slow to write rules.

The thirty that did nothing

The bottom of the scorecard is crowded and it is quiet. In roughly thirty states we could find no statewide law passed in 2025 or 2026 that changes a lot line, a setback, a height, a parking count or a review deadline. Many of them introduced bills. Kentucky's package died on April 16. Nebraska's ADU bill failed. New Mexico sent three bills to the floor and passed none. Minnesota's Starter Home Act stalled for a second year. Michigan, Illinois and Pennsylvania have bills in committee and little else.

New York deserves its own paragraph. The state that contains the most expensive housing market in the country has passed no statewide zoning reform of any kind. New York City's City of Yes is a municipal act, not a state one, and Gov. Kathy Hochul's efforts have gone to environmental review and tax credits. Realtor.com's 2026 report card ranked New York last of fifty, with a score of 8.5. On our scorecard it earns a D+, and only because a bill to bar downzoning is at least alive in committee.

Then there is the South. Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma together permitted hundreds of thousands of homes last year. Alabama's multifamily permits rose 76 percent through August. None of those states has told a city what it may not require of a builder. They build because land is cheap and councils are friendly, not because the legislature has tied anyone's hands. The day a suburb of Nashville or Charleston decides to require an acre per house, nothing in state law will stop it.

That is the point of grading policy rather than output. A state that builds a lot in 2026 has told you about 2026. A state that has changed the rules has told you something about 2036. Wyoming, the Dakotas, Alaska and Mississippi sit at the bottom not because their housing markets are broken but because they have left the question entirely to the counties, and the counties have left it alone.

Does any of it work? What the research says

The honest answer is: in hot markets, modestly, and more slowly than the press releases suggest.

The best new evidence is the Urban Institute's April 2026 study of upzonings in New York and Philadelphia. In most rezoned areas of New York, production rose within four years. Along the Jerome Avenue corridor in the Bronx it did not move at all. Philadelphia's citywide changes did not shift where developers chose to build. The authors conclude that upzoning is "insufficient" on its own and that the neighborhoods that grew "were likely already experiencing investment." A June follow-up puts Auckland's much-cited upzoning at roughly 20,000 extra homes over five years, about 5 percent of the region's stock. Real, not miraculous.

The sharpest skeptics are at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. In a working paper revised this February, Schuyler Louie, John Mondragon and Johannes Wieland argue that standard measures of supply constraint do not explain why prices and construction differ across American cities. If they are right, the states at the top of this scorecard have fixed something that matters less than its advocates believe. A peer-reviewed study of São Paulo's 2016 upzoning, published in August in the American Economic Journal, found a 1.9 percent increase in the housing stock and a half-percent price drop after a decade, along with a transfer of 11.3 billion reais from current owners to future ones. That is what reform looks like at scale: incremental, and politically expensive.

There is also the matter of timing. The AIA/Deltek Architecture Billings Index registered 47.2 in August, below the 50 line that separates growth from contraction, extending the longest slump in the index's history. Multifamily billings stood at 47.8. National permits ran at a 1.4 million annual pace. States legalized more housing in 2025 and 2026 than in any two years since the Second World War, and they did it in the worst financing market in fifteen years. Missoula's 88 percent drop in approvals is not an argument against Montana's law. It is an argument that a zoning code is a ceiling, not a floor, and that the ceiling matters only when someone wants to build.

The local-control case deserves a fair hearing, too, because it is winning in some places. "Colorado municipalities will not be bullied by an administration and legislature that gives lip service to local control," Kevin Bommer of the Colorado Municipal League said when the six cities filed. The Massachusetts Municipal Association's Adam Chapdelaine argues that towns should grow "through local planning and collaboration, not through a statewide mandate that removes local decision-making." In Texas, the developers themselves are hedging. "Most developers probably won't trigger SB 840 if they really are looking to have a long-term relationship with the city," one told The Real Deal in July. Asked whether officials slow SB 840 projects behind the scenes, another answered: "a thousand percent."

The scorecard: all 50 states

Grades as of October 16, 2026. "Mandate" means cities must comply; "optional" means the state enabled but did not require. States marked † could move on a pending event.

What to watch

Three dates will reshuffle the top of this list before spring.

November 3, 2026. Massachusetts votes on Question 7. If the 5,000-square-foot lot passes, it becomes the first dimension written into the state's zoning act since 1975, and Massachusetts moves to A−.

December 31, 2026. Colorado's transit-area housing reports come due from about thirty jurisdictions, and the state's highway-fund penalty for noncompliance becomes available. Somewhere in Denver District Court, a judge also holds the six-city home-rule case. Whichever comes first will decide whether Colorado's B+ was too generous or too stingy.

January 1, 2027. The busiest single day for site plans in a decade. North Carolina's parking ban takes effect. Virginia's Faith in Housing Act opens. California's townhome track and downtown-district mandate begin. Maryland's vesting rule will have three months of practice. Two weeks later, on January 15, every North Carolina city over 50,000 must allow an ADU behind every house. If the 2025 and 2026 sessions were about passing laws, 2027 will be about finding out which cities obey them.

The federal government has entered the field, too, though gently. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law in July without the President's signature. It asks HUD to publish model zoning frameworks within three years and says in plain language that no jurisdiction will be punished for ignoring them. Washington is watching. It is not yet grading.

A note on method. This scorecard rests on enrolled statutes, session-law lists, court opinions and agency releases, cross-checked against the trackers kept by the Mercatus Center, the AEI Housing Center, the Housing Affordability Institute and Pew. Where we could not confirm a bill's final text, we say so in the table rather than guess. We will regrade in January, after Massachusetts votes and Colorado reports. Readers who think we have a state wrong are invited to say so; the rubric is above, and the math is not hard.

Previously from Innowave Studio: America's great zoning revolution, mapped and measured · Zoning Reform 2025: parking minimums axed and FAR caps raised · What a parking minimum costs you, measured in units

Sources

• Mercatus Center, Framing Futures: Pro-Housing Legislation Goes Vertical in 2025, July 31, 2025

• AEI Housing Center, Texas Appleseed, Texans for Reasonable Solutions, SB 840 report, July 29, 2026; SB 15 report, July 29, 2026

• Texas Legislature, SB 840 enrolled text; SB 15

• Meyers Nave, SB 79 analysis, Oct. 29, 2025; Office of Gov. Newsom, housing bill signings, Sept. 29, 2026; YIMBY Law, San Francisco SB 79 suit, July 31, 2026; LA City Planning, SB 79 page

• Puget Sound Regional Council, Housing Incentives and Tools Survey, April 17, 2026; MRSC, Middle Housing

• Montana Supreme Court, 2026 MT 53, March 17, 2026; Pacific Legal Foundation release, March 18, 2026; Missoula Current, Housing permits slow in Missoula

• Massachusetts Attorney General, suit against nine communities, Jan. 29, 2026; statement on Marshfield ruling, Sept. 18, 2026; Tufts cSPA, 2026 ballot guide, Oct. 5, 2026; WBUR, Question 7, Oct. 7, 2026

• Colorado Newsline, cities sue over housing laws, May 2025; CPR News, cities at risk of losing funding, Oct. 7, 2025; Colorado Municipal League, Land use preemptions challenged, May 19, 2025

• North Carolina General Assembly, S.L. 2026-39; S.L. 2026-59 (SB 445); UNC School of Government, Limits on Local Parking Minimums, Sept. 18, 2026

• Ballard Spahr, Maryland Housing Certainty Act, May 2026; Maryland Matters, final bill signing, May 26, 2026

• Pacific Legal Foundation, Kansas SB 418, April 8, 2026; Johnson County Post, SB 418 compliance, Aug. 21, 2026

• Georgia Municipal Association, SB 447 tracker; HousingWire, Georgia permit shot clock, May 2026

• Indiana General Assembly, HB 1001 (2026); Indiana Capital Chronicle, Braun signs housing bill, April 13, 2026

• Virginia LIS, SB 531; McGuireWoods, Faith in Housing Act, May 2026

• Connecticut OLR, HB 8002 bill analysis, Nov. 12, 2025

• Realtor.com, 2026 State Report Cards, June 15, 2026

• Urban Institute, How Big Upzonings Affect Housing Supply, April 15, 2026; How Upzoning Affects Housing Supply, June 1, 2026

• Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Working Paper 2025-06, rev. Feb. 2026; American Economic Association, Who benefits from upzoning?, Aug. 2026

• AIA, ABI August 2026, Sept. 23, 2026; Census Bureau, New Residential Construction, August 2026, Sept. 17, 2026; NAHB Eye on Housing, permitting through August, Oct. 2026

• Bipartisan Policy Center, 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act summary, July 2026

• The Real Deal, Not so free-for-all, July 2026; Winstead, SB 840 update, March 5, 2026; Texas Tribune, new housing laws, July 27, 2026