Louisiana Eviction Process: Notice Periods, Timeline, and Costs

Louisiana uses one notice for every ground: a written five-day notice to vacate under La. Code Civ. Proc. art. 4701, which allows the lessee not less than five days from the date of delivery. The five days function as business days because the delivery date is not counted and legal holidays, which include Saturdays and Sundays in most parishes, are excluded from periods shorter than seven days under art. 5059, so five business days usually works out to about seven calendar days. The notice must name the tenant, identify the property, show the delivery or posting date, and describe the grounds specifically enough for the tenant to mount a defense; courts prefer wording that says five days from delivery rather than a fixed calendar date. Hand it to the tenant in front of a witness who can testify to delivery or use certified mail, because under art. 4703 tacking it to the door substitutes for personal delivery only when the premises are abandoned or closed or the tenant's whereabouts are unknown.

Lease violations use the identical five-business-day notice to vacate under art. 4701, because Louisiana has no separate cure-or-quit statute and draws no statutory distinction between curable and incurable violations. If your own lease gives the tenant a right to cure, that cure notice must be a separate, earlier document, and a notice to vacate served before the cure period expires is premature and will be dismissed.

To end a month-to-month tenancy without cause, La. Civ. Code art. 2728 requires written notice at least ten calendar days before the end of the monthly term, and the lease then ends at the end of that month; a lease measured by a period longer than a month requires thirty calendar days before the end of that period. Unlike the art. 4701 notice to vacate, this Civil Code termination notice cannot be waived in advance in the lease. No Louisiana jurisdiction imposes a just-cause eviction requirement.

You file a Rule for Possession, and justice of the peace courts hear residential evictions regardless of the rent amount while city and parish courts are capped at roughly $3,000 monthly or $36,000 yearly rent. Statutory justice of the peace costs are $120 plus $20 per additional defendant, while city courts run higher, such as $161 in Baton Rouge City Court and over $300 in New Orleans First City Court, with constable service and warrant fees charged separately.

Under La. Code Civ. Proc. art. 4732(A) the court cannot make the rule to show cause returnable earlier than the third day after the tenant is served. No written answer is required for the tenant to contest the eviction, since the tenant may simply appear and raise a defense, but a sworn written answer pleading an affirmative defense is what a tenant must file to qualify for a suspensive appeal.

Budget roughly a week for the notice period, a few days to file and obtain service, a hearing commonly set one to two weeks after filing, twenty-four hours for the tenant to comply with the judgment, and then a warrant of possession executed by the constable, sheriff, or marshal. A contested hearing, defective service, a miscounted notice period, or a suspensive appeal will push it well past six weeks.

Louisiana prohibits self-help eviction: you cannot change the locks, cut off utilities, remove doors, or put a tenant's belongings on the curb without a judgment of eviction and a warrant of possession executed by the sheriff, constable, or marshal under La. Code Civ. Proc. art. 4734. Doing it anyway is a wrongful or constructive eviction that breaches the warranty of peaceable possession and exposes you to general and special damages, an emergency injunction, and loss of your right to collect future rent. The one narrow exception is art. 4731(B), which lets you retake the premises without further judicial process after the required notice has been given if you have a reasonable belief the tenant has abandoned them.

Act 652 of 2024 (SB 466) made it criminal trespass for an occupant to remain more than five days after a proper notice to vacate and gave owners a temporary restraining order and injunction route against squatters, effective August 1, 2024. Act 250 of 2025 rewrote La. Code Civ. Proc. art. 5059 on computing time, preserving and renumbering the rule that excludes legal holidays from periods shorter than seven days, and a 2026 act changed security deposit return timing effective August 1, 2026; the five-day notice to vacate and the three-day rule to show cause are unchanged.

The most common way Louisiana landlords lose is arithmetic: counting the five days as calendar days, or filing on the fifth day instead of after five clear business days have run. The grounds stated in your notice must match the grounds in your rule for possession, and switching them gets the case dismissed as premature, just as tacking notice to the door does when the premises were neither abandoned nor closed and you knew where the tenant was. Be skeptical of the widely republished claim that a Louisiana self-help lockout carries a fixed statutory penalty of $500 or twice the monthly rent; no such statute exists, and the figure appears to be a garbled borrowing of the security deposit penalty in La. R.S. 9:3251 and 9:3252. If the rental is held in an LLC or corporation, verify representation with the clerk before you file, because La. R.S. 37:212(C) permits an entity to act through a duly authorized representative only in courts of limited jurisdiction and for small claims, and some courts require written proof of that authority filed into the record. In New Orleans, Healthy Homes registration is mandatory, a non-renewal within six months of a habitability complaint is presumed retaliatory, and tenants have a right to appointed counsel in eviction court.

• La. Code Civ. Proc. art. 4701
• La. Code Civ. Proc. art. 4732
• La. Civ. Code art. 2728