California’s fluorescent bulb law, Assembly Bill 2208, bans the sale and distribution of nearly every fluorescent light bulb in the state. Screw-base compact fluorescent lamps came off shelves on January 1, 2024, and pin-base CFLs plus all linear fluorescent tubes followed on January 1, 2025. You can keep using the bulbs you already own, but once they burn out, LEDs are effectively your only retail replacement.
What’s Banned and When
AB 2208 added Chapter 10.2 to the California Health and Safety Code and targets two product categories. Compact fluorescent lamps are the spiral or folded-tube bulbs that screw or snap into standard fixtures. Linear fluorescent lamps are the straight tubes common in offices, garages, and commercial buildings, including T5, T8, T10, and T12 sizes.
The prohibition reaches the whole supply chain. Manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and retailers cannot offer these products for final sale, sell them at final sale, or distribute them as new manufactured products in California. The rollout came in two stages:
- January 1, 2024: screw-base and bayonet-base CFLs.
- January 1, 2025: pin-base CFLs and all linear fluorescent tubes.
Both dates have passed, so every common consumer and commercial fluorescent bulb is now covered. The statute includes no sell-through window, so unsold inventory sitting on shelves after each deadline could not legally be offered as new.
Using Bulbs You Already Own
The law restricts selling and distributing. It says nothing about using. If you have spare T8 tubes in the garage or a shelf of CFLs in the closet, you can keep installing them in your own fixtures until they die. No one has to remove fluorescent lighting from an existing building, and no one is checking what’s screwed into your lamps.
Specialty Bulbs That Are Still Legal
Section 109022 of the Health and Safety Code exempts six categories of specialty fluorescent lamps where LED alternatives can’t reproduce the required light characteristics:
- Lamps for image capture and projection, including photocopying, printing, lithography, film and video projection, and holography.
- High-UV lamps, including germicidal lamps operating near 253.7 nanometers, disinfection and fly-trapping lamps, ozone-generating lamps, coral aquarium lamps, and tanning bed lamps.
- Medical and veterinary lamps used in diagnosis, treatment, or medical devices.
- Lamps used in pharmaceutical manufacturing and quality control.
- Lamps used in spectroscopy and photometric applications, including UV-visible and atomic absorption spectroscopy, infrared analysis, and environmental monitoring.
- Lamps used exclusively by research institutions for experiments.
Ordinary home, office, and retail lighting does not qualify under any of these categories.
Why Federal Rules Didn’t Already Do This
A common assumption is that Washington already banned fluorescent bulbs. It didn’t. The federal Energy Independence and Security Act, through Department of Energy rulemaking, set a minimum efficiency floor of 45 lumens per watt for general service lamps. That standard effectively ended traditional incandescent and halogen bulbs, but the federal definition of “general service lamp” specifically excludes general service fluorescent lamps and other fluorescent categories.
AB 2208 closes that gap in California. Linear tubes and pin-base CFLs that remain legal to buy in other states cannot be sold here. If you run a business with locations across state lines, purchasing decisions have to be made California by California.
Replacing Fluorescents With LEDs
Swapping a CFL is simple: match the base type and pick an LED with a similar lumen output. Linear tubes are more involved because the existing fixture has a ballast wired for fluorescent operation. Three retrofit paths cover most situations.
Type A tubes, sometimes called plug-and-play, work with your existing ballast. Pull the old tube, drop in the LED, done. The catch is that when the ballast eventually fails, you’ll have to replace it or rewire the fixture at that point.
Type B tubes bypass the ballast entirely and run directly on line voltage. An electrician rewires the fixture so power goes straight to the sockets. This is the most common long-term solution because it removes the ballast as a future failure point.
Magnetic retrofit kits are LED strips that attach inside existing troffer fixtures, replacing the tube-and-ballast assembly without swapping the housing. These work well for drop-ceiling office lighting.
Rebates and Tax Deductions
Lighting upgrades across a commercial building add up, and several programs offset the cost. California utilities run rebate programs for energy-efficient lighting. SMUD in Sacramento offers custom retrofit incentives of $0.10 per kilowatt-hour of annual energy reduction, capped at 50 percent of project cost or $100,000, whichever is less. Investor-owned utilities across the state run comparable programs, generally with pre-approval required and funding on a first-come, first-served basis.
Section 179D of the Internal Revenue Code offers a federal tax deduction for energy-efficient commercial building improvements, including lighting. For 2025, the deduction ranges from $0.58 to $5.81 per square foot depending on the energy savings achieved and whether the project meets prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements. Construction must begin before July 1, 2026, to qualify under the current statutory authorization.
Getting Rid of Old Fluorescents Legally
Every fluorescent bulb contains mercury, so disposal is regulated separately from the sales ban. Under California’s Universal Waste Rule, mercury-containing lamps are hazardous waste. Putting them in the household trash or a curbside recycling bin is illegal.
The Department of Toxic Substances Control requires used fluorescent lamps to go through an authorized recycling program. Options include local household hazardous waste collection events, permanent drop-off facilities, and take-back programs at many home improvement retailers. Store spent bulbs somewhere dry where they won’t break and children and pets can’t reach them.
One detail worth knowing: DTSC notes that many LED bulbs also qualify as hazardous waste because they contain copper, zinc, antimony, or nickel above California toxicity thresholds. When in doubt, treat a dead LED as universal waste too.
Under California Health and Safety Code Section 25189, intentionally disposing of hazardous waste at an unauthorized location carries a civil penalty of $1,000 to $70,000 per violation. Negligent disposal can also reach $70,000 per violation. Each day the waste sits at the unauthorized location counts as a separate violation, so the numbers compound fast.