Oregon’s new law lets property owners give squatters 24 hours to leave, helping reduce costly delays and damage before a home can be reclaimed.

Oregon lawmakers have approved House Bill 3522, creating a faster legal process for property owners dealing with squatters. The bill, backed by a bipartisan group of legislators, changes state law to allow owners and landlords to reclaim their property with just 24 hours written notice to the squatter.

The Issue: Squatters Have Rights, Even If They Conflict With A Homeowner's Rights

Imagine you have moved to a new city and your old house has been sitting empty for a few weeks, or months. You finally get everything together to put your old house up for sale, and go over there to fix some things up and make sure it's ready for buyers to see, but you find strangers living in your house. Maybe they're keeping it nice, just like you left it. Or maybe you walk up to the door and find trash strewn across the front yard, the front window broken out, and a brand new lock installed on the front door. You peek in the windows and find furniture that doesn't belong to you, and more trash strewn across what was once a nice living room floor.

These guys are trespassers, clear and simple, so you call the police. But the police show up to get them out, and are met by the trespassers with a fake lease you never signed, stating they have the right to live there. The police leave, because there's nothing they can do for now, and you're told to take it through the court system. The problem? It's going to take time and money to get the trespassers out of your house.

In the meantime, you can't sell the house in the state it's in, and you can't legally make the trespassers move out, because under the law, they're not trespassers, but squatters, and in most states, squatters have rights, even if those rights conflict with yours as the homeowner.

Recently, the state of Oregon set out to make it faster and easier for home and property owners to move squatters off of their property.

What House Bill 3522 Aims To Do To Fix The Problem

Under the new law, which will go into effect in January of 2026, owners and landlords can give squatters a 24-hour written notice to vacate. The notice must clearly state the date and time the person must leave, along with the reason for the termination, specifically, their status as a squatter. Importantly, delivering this notice does not create any right of tenancy for the squatter. If the person fails to vacate by the deadline, the property owner can take legal action under Oregon’s existing eviction procedures.

What counts as a squatter? A squatter is anyone living in a home or using property as a place to live without a rental agreement and without the owner or current tenant’s permission. This does not include people whose lease has ended but who haven’t moved out yet (those “holdover tenants” are handled under different rules).

Why Lawmakers Took Action

Lawmakers say the change is aimed at closing a gap between trespassing and adverse possession laws. Adverse possession (a separate legal process that lets someone try to claim ownership after 10 years of living on a property without permission) remains unchanged. House Bill 3522 focuses only on people with no legal right to stay and no claim that meets those requirements.

Before, getting squatters out could take weeks or months. Now, owners can give a 24-hour written notice and, if the squatter doesn’t leave, file a complaint in court using a standard form.

What House Bill 3522 Doesn't Do: The bill doesn’t change the rules for legal tenants or for adverse possession claims. It’s designed to make it easier and quicker to remove someone who has no legal right to stay.

Squatting is a problem all over the United States, and the news and platforms like YouTube and Reddit are filled with videos and pleas for help from home and land owners facing this issue. Some squatters completely destroy the property they're staying in before they're able to be removed by legal means, leaving homeowners devastated, or facing a huge financial burden to fix or clean up their property so they can sell it. With Oregon's new law, homeowners can shorten the time a home is tied up in the eviction process.