Free tool · Los Angeles
What does a squatter cost you in California?
Change the numbers to match your property. The rent is California's own, from HUD; how long it drags on is your call; everything else is yours to overwrite.
California estimate
$44,806
Your numbers.
These are national starting points, not claims about your property. The one figure that drives the total — how long it drags on — is yours to set. Nobody can source it, so we do not pretend to.
How long before you get it back?
6 months
Your assumption, not ours — courts do not publish how long this takes. A contested removal runs in months, not weeks, almost everywhere; how it goes in California is in the guide.
How many bedrooms?
Sets the rent from HUD’s published Fair Market Rent for Los Angeles — $3,681/mo.
Mortgage / loan payment — per month
$
Only you know this one. The placeholder is roughly a $300k loan at current rates.
Lost rent or delayed sale — per month
$
HUD's Fair Market Rent for this metro, at the bedroom count you picked. It is the 40th percentile of recent-mover rents, so on a renovated or market-rate property it is a floor, not a valuation.
Attorney fees — one-off
$
No public data exists. Our estimate — nothing published backs it. No state bar and no court in any of these markets publishes fee data for an ejectment. Get a written quote and put it here.
Property taxes — per month
$
Your bill, divided by twelve. The placeholder is roughly a $250k property at Philadelphia's 1.3998% — Newark runs 1.845%, Los Angeles 1.187%.
Insurance — per month
$
No public data exists. Our estimate. Vacant cover genuinely does cost more, but the published figures for how much more disagree by a factor of five — anywhere from +25% to 5x. Use your own premium.
Utilities — per month
$
A national placeholder, unless your state overrides it below — Philadelphia's is the Water Department's own published bill. Whoever is inside, you are the ratepayer of record.
Damage and clean-out — one-off
$
No public data exists. Our estimate, and we want to be blunt: NO government body in the United States publishes squatter-damage data. Every figure you have seen quoted traces to one news story or to a lobby survey that counted houses, not dollars. We are not going to launder a number we cannot stand behind — put yours here.
If it happens in California
$44,806
at 6 months— and every extra month adds $6,051.
Against a $0–$120k range, so the bar means something as you drag.
Carrying it, empty ($6,051/mo × 6 mo)
$36,306
One-off costs (attorney, damage)
$8,500
What ruins you is the carry — the months. On top of this you will pay to file, for the sheriff to serve and remove, and for a lawyer. Those are set locally and we do not print a number we cannot cite — but next to the months, they are a sliver.
Can you get any of it back? NO. Civil Code § 1717 needs a contract, and you have none with a squatter. CCP § 1174 has no fee provision at all.
Why California costs what it does
California looks fast and is not, and the reason is close to cruel. The unlawful-detainer statute is written around tenants and leases, and a squatter has neither. The forcible-detainer route is open only to an owner who was in 'peaceable and undisturbed possession' within five days before the entry — which the owner of a vacant property, by definition, was not. The vacancy that made your property a target is the same fact that closes the fast door. Most lawyers file an unlawful detainer anyway and hope nobody contests it; if someone does, you are in ejectment — an ordinary civil lawsuit, no summary track, and the court's own standard allows it twenty-four months.
What the total doesn’t show you
Real, sourced, and deliberately not in the number above — none of them has a published amount, and we would rather name a cost than invent it.
The squatter can demand a jury — and you pay for it
Either side may demand a jury. The demanding party posts $150, nonrefundable, and then funds the entire venire every day it sits — roughly $180/day in juror fees for twelve jurors, plus mileage, plus an LA court reporter at $764 a day.
Rare and catastrophic: of 52,102 unlawful detainers disposed of in LA County in FY2023–24, just 246 went to a jury — about one in two hundred. It is a tail risk, not a base case, and it is the tail that bankrupts people.
You cannot get the court's fees back — even when you win
A squatter answers for $0 on a fee waiver. The rule that normally makes a losing party repay the fees the court waived for them expressly 'does not apply to… unlawful detainer cases.'
The Legislature did not merely fail to give the owner a recovery here. It wrote the carve-out.
The only fee-shifting statute in the case points at you
Change the locks, cut the utilities, or move their belongings and the penalty is actual damages, up to $100 per day, a $250 minimum per cause of action — and 'the court shall award reasonable attorney's fees to the prevailing party.'
The asymmetry is total. You cannot recover fees from the squatter — California requires a contract, and you have none. The squatter CAN recover fees from you. Self-help in California is not merely illegal; it is the one place in the whole dispute where money changes hands, and it moves away from the owner.
You front the movers and the storage, and you never see it again
'The landlord shall store the personal property in a place of safekeeping.' The occupant may reclaim it by paying the reasonable cost of storage within 15 days — 18 if you mailed the notice.
A right to CHARGE a squatter for storage is worth exactly nothing against a squatter who never comes back for the sofa. Model it as money you spend, not money you recover. No California body publishes what the movers cost, so we do not guess.
The city fines you for a violation you are physically unable to cure
Los Angeles requires the owner of a vacant building to keep every opening secured. A break-in creates the violation. LADBS then issues an Order to Comply, and the fees follow: a $356 inspection fee 'which must be paid even if you comply with the Order before its due date', and a $660 non-compliance fee — $2,310 if it goes 30 days unpaid.
Read the sequence again: you are ordered to secure a building you cannot enter, because there is a stranger living in it, and you are fined for failing. It is the only squatter-caused cost in this entire dataset that a government body actually publishes a dollar figure for — everything else people quote at you is an anecdote.
“The occupant of real property, within the meaning of this section, is one who, within five days preceding such unlawful entry, was in the peaceable and undisturbed possession of such lands.”
CCP § 1161 is written around 'a tenant' and 'the lease' — Berry v. Society of Saint Pius X (1999) holds unlawful detainer lies in only three situations, none of them a stranger-trespasser. Counsel typically files anyway on a licensee theory. It works on default and is vulnerable the moment it is contested.
The statute
CCP §§ 1159–1179a; Berry v. Society of Saint Pius X (1999) 69 Cal.App.4th 354
Rent, by bedroom
1 bed $2,328 · 2 bed $2,903 · 3 bed $3,681 · 4 bed $4,098
Revised 2026-04-21, effective 2026-05-21
Revised upward on 2026-04-21, effective 2026-05-21. HUD's own schedule PDF still prints the old, lower numbers — cite the Federal Register, not the PDF.
Civil Code § 1717 needs a contract, and you have none with a squatter. CCP § 1174 has no fee provision at all.
Is there a fast sheriff route?
No — SB 448 died in February 2026. But Penal Code § 602(o) is worth knowing about.
PC § 602(o) lets an owner file a NOTARIZED letter with the police, valid for 12 months, pre-authorising trespass arrests. Notarised. Expiring. Filed with law enforcement. California has legislated the shape of this instrument — including the freshness requirement — it just has not solved who verifies the owner.
This is the bill for finding out too late.
Nothing on this page will get an occupant out, and be wary of anyone who says otherwise. What DeedProof does is earlier and duller: it verifies you own the property, structures the statement you swear before a notary, and files it — so that if someone does break in, the officer at the door has something to work from instead of a lease they cannot check.
The decision still belongs to the officer. Our job is to make it an easy one.
This page is the money. The law behind it is on California’s guide — whether police can arrest, whether a sheriff can act on your affidavit alone, and how long occupation takes to become a claim. Every answer quoted from the statute.