About
About PlainStatute
Official state law, in plain English. One page per state.
PlainStatute is written and maintained by Cholilurrohman (LinkedIn). The method for each page is the same: read the official statute, then write down what it says as a clean, one-page-per-state summary that answers the exact question you searched for.
The site began with a specific gap. On July 1, 2024, California's AB 12 lowered the security-deposit cap from two months' rent to one month. Months later, large aggregator sites still showed the old two-month figure. Anyone checking how much a landlord could hold was reading a number the law had already changed. PlainStatute exists to close that kind of gap: read the current statute, state the current number, and link the source.
Cholilurrohman is not a lawyer. What he does instead is narrow and checkable: open the official statute text, record what it actually says, cite the exact section, link to that primary source, and note the date it was last reviewed. Every figure on a verified page is tied to a primary source and links to it: usually the state legislature's own statute database, the official administrative code, or the state agency that issues the rule, and where the official text is blocked or the rule comes from elsewhere, a disclosed mirror of that code, the controlling federal statute, or the governing court decision. Showing the source is a stronger signal than claiming a title.
PlainStatute is also more than a set of summaries. From the same 50-state corpus it computes original datasets, scored directly from the statutes: the Renter Protection Index, the Debtor Protection Index, and the rest of our research. These are original rankings you can cite, computed from primary law, not a summary of someone else's work.
Pages that have not finished that check carry a visible "Cited" label — cited to its source, but not yet confirmed against the statute text — instead of presenting an unconfirmed figure as confirmed. The full method is in the editorial standards.
If you spot an outdated figure, the contact page is the way to flag it; corrections are re-checked against the primary source and the review date is updated.
PlainStatute is an independent reference site. It is not a law firm and nothing here is legal advice; statutes change, and the official source linked on each page is always the authority.