Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms in a Skokie rental: who installs them, who keeps them working

Two state statutes carry the rules for a Skokie rental — the Smoke Detector Act, in force since 1988 and rewritten for sealed ten-year batteries from 2023, and the Carbon Monoxide Alarm Detector Act of 2007 — and the Cook County ordinance folds “smoke alarms, smoke detectors” into what makes a unit habitable. The statutes say, unusually plainly, which jobs are the landlord's and which are the tenant's. This page quotes them.

What this page is: the statutes and codes that decide who must put smoke and carbon monoxide alarms in a Skokie rental, where, who maintains them, and what a tenant can do when one is missing — each quoted from and linked to its official text. It is not legal advice. Where a rule could not be read from a primary source, the page says so instead of guessing. When it matters, read the linked source or use the free legal help on our tenant rights page.

Where the alarms go: within 15 feet of every bedroom, and at the top of each interior stairwell — 425 ILCS 60/3(a) and (c)

The placement rule is one sentence: “Every dwelling unit or hotel shall be equipped with at least one approved smoke detector in an operating condition within 15 feet of every room used for sleeping purposes.” The mounting rule follows it: “The detector shall be installed on the ceiling and at least 6 inches from any wall, or on a wall located between 4 and 6 inches from the ceiling.” A building with more than one unit — every Skokie apartment building — also needs, under paragraph (c), “at least one approved smoke detector at the uppermost ceiling of each interior stairwell.” A rented single-family house gets paragraph (b) instead: one on every story “including basements but not including unoccupied attics.” “Approved” is defined in Section 2 as an ionization or photoelectric detector that meets the State Fire Marshal's rules. The Act does not say who may be asked to prove the alarm is approved, and this page did not read the Fire Marshal's rules themselves. Source: 425 ILCS 60/3 — Smoke Detector Act, Sec. 3 · 425 ILCS 60/2 — definitions

Who does what: the owner installs, the tenant tests and replaces batteries — 425 ILCS 60/3(d)

Paragraph (d) divides the job line by line. The owner: “It shall be the responsibility of the owner of a structure to supply and install all required detectors. The owner shall be responsible for making reasonable efforts to test and maintain detectors in common stairwells and hallways.” The tenant: “It shall be the responsibility of a tenant to test and to provide general maintenance for the detectors within the tenant's dwelling unit or rooming unit, and to notify the owner or the authorized agent of the owner in writing of any deficiencies which the tenant cannot correct.” The owner again: “The owner shall be responsible for providing one tenant per dwelling unit with written information regarding detector testing and maintenance.” Batteries: “The tenant shall be responsible for replacement of any required batteries in the smoke detectors in the tenant's dwelling unit, except that the owner shall ensure that such batteries are in operating condition at the time the tenant takes possession of the dwelling unit.” And access: the tenant “shall provide the owner or the authorized agent of the owner with access to the dwelling unit to correct any deficiencies in the smoke detector which have been reported in writing.” Three things follow for a Skokie tenant. You are expected to press the test button; a chirping alarm with a replaceable battery is yours to fix; and anything you cannot fix — a dead unit, a missing one, a sealed alarm at the end of its life — becomes the owner's job the moment you report it in writing, which is also the moment the clock on the county remedies starts. Source: 425 ILCS 60/3(d) — Smoke Detector Act, Sec. 3

The sealed ten-year battery rule, in force since January 1, 2023 — 425 ILCS 60/3(e) and the State Fire Marshal's reading

For any unit that existed on July 1, 1988 — most of Skokie's rental stock — paragraph (e) now allows only two kinds of alarm: “battery powered provided the battery is a self-contained, non-removable, long-term battery, or wired into the structure's AC power line, and need not be interconnected.” The sealed-battery requirement reaches a battery alarm that is “in existence and exceed 10 years from the date of their being manufactured,” one that “fail to respond to operability tests or otherwise malfunction,” or one that is “newly installed.” It does not reach an alarm that is part of “a centrally monitored or supervised alarm system,” or one that talks to the internet or a hub by “a low-power radio frequency wireless communication signal” or Wi-Fi. The State Fire Marshal's page puts the rule in plain words: as of January 1, 2023, “any new smoke alarm being installed within a single or multi-family home are required to be featured with a 10-year sealed battery,” and alarms installed before that date “may remain in place until they exceed 10 years from their manufactured date, fails to respond to operability tests, or otherwise malfunctions.” Newer construction has its own rule in paragraph (f): a unit built, reconstructed or substantially remodelled after December 31, 1987 needs alarms “permanently wired into the structure's AC power line,” interconnected “so that the actuation of one detector will actuate all the detectors in the dwelling unit,” and, if the work was done on or after January 1, 2011, with “an alternative back-up power source.” Our reading of how this meets paragraph (d): a sealed alarm has no battery to replace, so when one dies the fix is a new alarm, and supplying and installing alarms is the owner's job — the tenant's part is the written notice. The Act does not spell that sentence out; it is the two paragraphs read together. Source: 425 ILCS 60/3(e)–(f) — Smoke Detector Act, Sec. 3 · Illinois Office of the State Fire Marshal — Illinois Smoke Alarm Law (effective January 1, 2023)

Penalties: a 90-day warning and fines for the battery rule, misdemeanors for willful failure and for tampering — 425 ILCS 60/4

Section 4 has three tiers. Paragraph (a), except where the battery rule's own track applies: “willful failure to install or maintain in operating condition any smoke detector required by this Act shall be a Class B misdemeanor.” Tampering is worse, and it is written to reach anyone, tenants included: “tampering with, removing, destroying, disconnecting or removing the batteries from any installed smoke detector, except in the course of inspection, maintenance or replacement of the detector, shall be a Class A misdemeanor in the case of a first conviction, and a Class 4 felony in the case of a second or subsequent conviction.” The sealed-battery rule gets a gentler track, added by the 2017 amendment that took effect in 2023: a violator “shall be provided with 90 days' warning with which to rectify that violation,” and only then “may be assessed a fine of up to $100, and may be fined $100 every 30 days thereafter until either the violation is rectified or the cumulative amount of fines assessed reaches $1,500.” The misdemeanor provisions apply to a battery-rule violation only after that $1,500 ceiling is reached and the violation still stands, and “If the alleged violation has been corrected prior to or on the date of the hearing scheduled to adjudicate the alleged violation, then the violation shall be dismissed.” The renter-side lesson is in the tampering tier: pulling the battery out of a chirping alarm is the one thing the statute treats as a crime, so the answer to a chirp is a battery or a written notice, not silence. Source: 425 ILCS 60/4 — Smoke Detector Act, Sec. 4 (P.A. 100-200, eff. 1-1-23)

Carbon monoxide alarms: the same 15-foot rule and the same split, since 2007 — 430 ILCS 135/10, /15 and /20

The Carbon Monoxide Alarm Detector Act copies the smoke statute's shape. Placement: “Every dwelling unit shall be equipped with at least one approved carbon monoxide alarm in an operating condition within 15 feet of every room used for sleeping purposes.” A combined smoke-and-CO unit is allowed “provided that the combined unit emits an alarm in a manner that clearly differentiates the hazard.” The split in paragraph (c) is the smoke statute's, word for word in substance: “It is the responsibility of the owner of a structure to supply and install all required alarms. It is the responsibility of a tenant to test and to provide general maintenance for the alarms within the tenant's dwelling unit or rooming unit, and to notify the owner or the authorized agent of the owner in writing of any deficiencies that the tenant cannot correct,” with the same written-information duty on the owner, the same battery rule on the tenant, and the same guarantee that the owner “shall ensure that the batteries are in operating condition at the time the tenant takes possession.” Power: a CO alarm “may be either battery powered, plug-in with battery back-up, or wired into the structure's AC power line with secondary battery back-up” — there is no sealed-battery requirement in this Act. Penalties mirror Section 4 of the smoke statute: willful failure a Class B misdemeanor, tampering a Class A misdemeanor and then a Class 4 felony. The exemptions in Section 20 are real but narrow: a unit in a building that “does not rely on combustion of fossil fuel for heat, ventilation, or hot water,” “is not connected in any way to a garage,” and is not close enough to a CO source to receive it “as determined by the local building commissioner.” A gas furnace, a gas water heater, or an attached garage puts a Skokie building inside the rule. Source: 430 ILCS 135/10 — Carbon Monoxide Alarm Detector Act, Sec. 10 · 430 ILCS 135/15 — Violation · 430 ILCS 135/20 — Exemptions

The county ordinance makes alarms a habitability item — Cook County RTLO Sec. 42-805(C)(3)(d)

The state Acts say what must be there; the county ordinance says what a tenant can do when it is not. Sec. 42-805(C) gives every covered tenant “the right to a dwelling that materially complies with habitability,” and its list of habitability standards includes, at item (d), “Appropriate number, location and accessibility of smoke alarms, smoke detectors, sprinkler systems, standpipe systems, fire alarm systems, automatic fire detectors, and fire extinguishers.” Carbon monoxide alarms are not named in (d), but item (y) requires the unit and common areas to be “in a fit and habitable condition and in compliance with all applicable local, municipal, state, and federal regulations,” which folds in the CO Act. That placement is what gives a missing alarm its remedies: the written-notice-then-remedy sequence of Sec. 42-806 — the repair deadlines, repair-and-deduct, rent reduction and termination — is laid out with today's rent figures on <a href="/repairs/">the repairs page</a>, and a smoke or CO alarm complaint runs on it like any other habitability defect. The ordinance covers most rentals in suburban Cook County, Skokie included, with the exemptions in Sec. 42-802; <a href="/tenant-rights/">the tenant-rights page</a> has the coverage test. Source: Cook County RTLO — ordinance text as posted by the county (PDF, dated January 2021), Sec. 42-805(C)(3)(d) and (y) · Cook County RTLO

What to do when an alarm is missing, chirping, or dead

Test it; the Act expects you to. A chirp from an alarm with a door on the back is a battery, and under 425 ILCS 60/3(d) that battery is yours. Anything else — a sealed alarm that chirps or fails its test, a missing alarm, a stairwell with none — goes to the owner in writing the same day, with the date, the unit and which alarm, because both Acts make written notice the trigger for the owner's duty and Sec. 42-806 makes it the trigger for the county remedies. Keep a copy. Do not pull the battery or take the alarm down; Section 4 treats that as a crime. If nothing happens, the Village of Skokie's Property Standards division enforces the local codes that the county ordinance points to, and <a href="/retaliation/">the retaliation page</a> covers the ordinance's protection for the complaint itself. Source: Village of Skokie — Property Standards · Illinois Office of the State Fire Marshal — Illinois Smoke Alarm Law

What this page does not know

Honest caveat: no public dataset counts alarm violations, fires or carbon monoxide incidents by city or ZIP, so there are no local figures on this page — only the rules and their sources. The State Fire Marshal's rules defining an “approved” alarm were not read; the Village of Skokie's own fire and property-maintenance codes could not be read from a source we could fetch (every host of the village code, and skokie.org itself, refuses automated requests), so this page states state and county law only and cannot say whether Skokie has adopted stricter local amendments. Where the page says a rule is silent, that is a statement about the text we read, not a promise that no other rule exists.

Where an alarm problem usually goes next

A missing or dead alarm is a code condition, so the route to getting it fixed — the written notice, the inspection request, and the remedies at today's rents — is on the repairs page; if the alarm is going off because a heating appliance is the problem, the utilities page covers who pays when the heat or the gas is at issue; the landlord's visit to replace one is an entry event with notice rules of its own; and a fire is the case renters insurance exists for — the renters-insurance page covers what a policy pays and what a lease may demand. If the building's economics are the real problem, each Skokie ZIP's current average (60077, 60076) says what moving costs instead.

Page last updated October 11, 2026 · rent index data through August 2026.