Short answer: AB 1327 became law on January 1, 2026. It changed the way a California homeowner cancels a home improvement contract. Email now counts, and the first page of your contract has to carry the email address the Notice of Cancellation goes to, plus a phone number the buyer can call for help filling that notice out. The cancellation windows themselves did not change. What changed is the channel, and that makes an email address you do not read into a business risk you did not have in December.
What actually changed
The bill is AB 1327 (Aguiar-Curry), chaptered as Statutes of 2025, Chapter 348, approved by the Governor on October 6, 2025 and operative January 1, 2026. Its title is “Home improvement and home solicitation: right to cancel contracts: notice.”
It amended Business and Professions Code sections 7159 and 17511.5, and Civil Code sections 1689.6, 1689.7, 1689.20 and 1689.21. In plain terms, it touched home improvement contracts, home solicitation contracts, and seminar sales contracts all at once.
The core change lives in Civil Code 1689.6, which now reads:
Cancellation occurs when the buyer gives written notice of cancellation to the seller at the address or email address specified in the agreement or offer.
Four words, and they move where a legally effective cancellation can land.
The Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection was blunt about why this took so long. Its analysis notes that the Legislature last changed the provisions governing how a person cancels a home improvement contract in 1995, and that in 1995 only about 3 percent of Americans had used the web. The rule that a homeowner had to physically mail you a piece of paper survived thirty years past the point where anyone would choose to do that.
The three lines that have to be on page one
Business and Professions Code 7159 now requires the contract to contain, on the first page, in a typeface no smaller than the one used in the body of the document, all of the following:
(i) The date the buyer signed the contract.
(ii) The name, address, and email address of the contractor to whom the applicable “Notice of Cancellation” is to be sent, immediately preceded by a statement advising the buyer that the “Notice of Cancellation” may be sent to the contractor at the address or email address noted on the contract.
(iii) The telephone number of the contractor, or the contractor’s representative, to assist the buyer with locating and filling out the “Notice of Cancellation.”
Read clause (ii) closely. It is not “an email address.” It is the name, the mailing address, and the email address, together. A contract that lists only an email, or only a street address, is not what the section asks for. The committee record confirms this was deliberate: a late amendment specifically clarified that both the mailing address and the email address have to be disclosed.
Clause (iii) is the one most contractors will misread, so it gets its own section below.
No, they cannot cancel by telephone
You will find summaries of this bill saying California homeowners can now cancel a home improvement contract “by email or phone.” That was true of the bill as introduced on February 21, 2025. It is not true of the law.
The Contractors State License Board took an oppose-unless-amended position specifically on the phone provision. In the Board’s words:
While this bill may make canceling a HIC easier for consumers by allowing for cancellation by email or telephone, cancellation by telephone does not provide a record of the cancellation. This puts a consumer at a disadvantage should the contractor deny having received the call.
The committee agreed, calling the criticism valid and adding that it is harder to verify that the person calling is the person who signed. The author accepted the amendment and the telephone cancellation language was struck. What replaced it is clause (iii): a phone number, printed on your contract, that a buyer calls not to cancel but to get help completing the written notice.
That distinction matters on your end. A homeowner who calls that number and says “I want to cancel” has not cancelled. They have called a help line. Whoever answers needs to understand the difference and needs to say the right thing, which is that the cancellation has to be in writing and here is exactly where to send it. Telling a customer “sure, I’ll take care of it” on that call creates a dispute where the paper record shows no cancellation and the customer believes they cancelled. Telling them “you can’t do that by phone” and hanging up is worse, because the statute put your number there precisely so they would get help.
Which of your jobs this covers
Nearly all of the residential ones. Business and Professions Code 7159(b) defines a home improvement contract by an aggregate contract price exceeding five hundred dollars. A panel swap, a service upgrade, an EV charger install, a whole-house rewire, a generator interlock, a recessed lighting package: all of them clear $500 without effort. The threshold has not moved and this bill did not change it.
The cancellation windows did not change either:
- Three business days is the standard right to cancel.
- Five business days if the buyer is a senior citizen, which has been the rule since 2021.
- Seven business days for a contract to repair or restore damage from a sudden or catastrophic event for which a state of emergency or local emergency has been declared.
That third window is the one that lands on electricians hardest, because it attaches to exactly the work you get called for after a windstorm, a fire, or a flood. A homeowner who signs a restoration contract on Tuesday during a declared emergency has until midnight of the seventh business day, and now can end it from a phone in a hotel room.
Note also what did not change: this bill is not the first time email cancellation exists in California contracting law. The committee analysis points out that consumers could already cancel service and repair contracts under Business and Professions Code 7159.10 and PACE assessment contracts by email. AB 1327 brought the ordinary home improvement contract in line with rules that already applied elsewhere in your paperwork.
One more thing worth saying plainly, because it is circulating: AB 1327 does not, by its own terms, impose a deadline for emailing the signed contract to the buyer. If someone tells you that you now have 24 hours to send an executed copy, ask them which section says so before you build a process around it.
What it costs you if the notice is missing
Two separate consequences, and they stack.
Section 7159 provides that failure by the licensee, their agent or salesperson to provide the specified information, notices, and disclosures in the contract, or to otherwise fail to comply with any provision of the section, is cause for discipline. That is your license.
The section also states that if the applicable “Notice of Cancellation” is not included in or attached to the contract as required, the buyer may file a complaint with the Contractors State License Board. That is a complaint your customer is told about, in your own contract.
There is a quieter cost too. The cancellation clock generally does not start until the buyer has a compliant, signed and dated agreement in hand. A contract that is missing a required element does not start the clock cleanly, which means the three days you thought closed in January may not have closed at all. That is the real reason to fix the form now rather than at renewal.
The other bill that hit the same section
While you are in the contract template anyway, know that AB 1327 was not the only 2025 bill to amend Business and Professions Code 7159 effective January 1, 2026. SB 517 (Statutes of 2025, Chapter 585) also amended it, adding a subcontractor disclosure: a checked yes or no statement in the contract about whether a subcontractor will be used on the project, and, where the answer is yes, a disclaimer that the contractor is aware a list of subcontractors must be provided on request along with their names, contact information, license number, and classification.
The two bills amended the same section in the same session, which is why the codified version carries a harmonized section number. If you updated your contract for one of them and not the other, you updated it halfway. Pull the current text of 7159 rather than working from either bill in isolation.
How to actually handle this
- Pick the email address on purpose. Whatever address you print is the address at which a cancellation becomes legally effective. If it is a personal address you check on Sundays, or an old address that forwards to nobody, change it before it costs you a mobilized crew. Use a monitored shared inbox, not one person’s phone.
- Watch the spam folder. A homeowner writing an angry cancellation from a webmail account is exactly the message a filter eats. “It went to junk” is not a defense that the statute contemplates.
- Know the mail rule is different from the email rule. Civil Code 1689.6 states that notice of cancellation, if given by mail, is effective when deposited in the mail properly addressed with postage prepaid. The statute does not spell out an equivalent moment for email. Do not build a scheduling policy on a theory that an email that reaches you late was sent late.
- Timestamp receipt, do not just read it. If a cancellation arrives, log the date and time it hit the inbox and acknowledge it in writing the same day. The whole reason CSLB killed phone cancellation was the absence of a record. That reasoning cuts your way too.
- Answer the help-line number correctly. Whoever picks up clause (iii) calls should be able to say, in one sentence, that cancelling has to be in writing, that email counts, and what address to send it to. Write that sentence down and make sure everyone who answers your phone has it.
- Do not schedule material or crew inside the window on a fresh residential signup. This is old advice that the new channel makes sharper, because cancelling is now genuinely easy. It is the same discipline as pricing the job right the first time, since a job you have to unwind costs more than one you priced carefully to begin with.
What to tell the person who calls
These calls do not announce themselves. They come in as “I changed my mind about Tuesday,” or “my daughter says I should think about this,” or “how do I get out of the paperwork I signed.” Sometimes they come from an adult child calling on a parent’s behalf, which is common on the five-day senior window. Sorting a real cancellation from a question nobody answered is the same skill covered in what to ask on every electrical call.
The plain version is short. You have a right to cancel in writing within a few days of signing. You can send it by email now, and the email address is printed on the first page of the contract, along with a phone number if you want help filling the form out. Tell us the date you signed, because the clock runs from that.
What you actually need off that call is narrow: who is calling and whether they are the person who signed, the date on the contract, and whether they are asking to cancel or asking a question they might not need to cancel over. That last one is worth a beat. A fair number of these calls are not really cancellations, they are a price question or a schedule question that nobody answered for four days. Catching that on the phone is the difference between a job you keep and a Notice of Cancellation you have to honor. Missing the call entirely means you find out when the email arrives, and by then the decision has been made without you in the room. It is the same gap covered in what a missed call actually costs a California electrician.
