Cell migration is important in many biological processes, including embryonic development, cancer metastasis, and wound healing. In these tissues, a cell's motion is often strongly constrained by its neighbors, leading to glassy dynamics. While self-propelled particle models exhibit a density-driven glass transition, this does not explain liquid-to-solid transitions in confluent tissues, where there are no gaps between cells and therefore the density is constant. Here we demonstrate the existence of a new type of rigidity transition that occurs in the well-studied vertex model for confluent tissue monolayers at constant density. We find the onset of rigidity is governed by a model parameter that encodes single-cell properties such as cell-cell adhesion and cortical tension, providing an explanation for a liquid-to-solid transitions in confluent tissues and making testable predictions about how these transitions differ from those in particulate matter.Important biological processes such as embryogensis, tumorigenesis, and wound healing require cells to move collectively within a tissue. Recent experiments suggest that when cells are packed ever more densely, they start to exhibit collective motion [1][2][3] traditionally seen in non-living disordered systems such as colloids, granular matter or foams [4][5][6]. These collective behaviors exhibit growing timescales and lengthscales associated with rigidity transitions.Many of these effects are also seen in Self-Propelled Particle (SPP) models [7]. In SPP models, overdamped particles experience an active force that causes them to move at a constant speed, and particles change direction due to interactions with their neighbors or an external bath. To model cells with a cortical network of actomyosin and adhesive molecules on their surfaces, particles interact as repulsive disks or spheres, sometimes with an additional short-range attraction [8,9]. These models generically exhibit a glass transition at a critical packing density of particles, φ c , where φ c < 1 [1,8,10,11], and near the transition point they exhibit collective motion [8] that is very similar to that seen in experiments [12].An important open question is whether the density-driven glass transition in SPP models explains the glassy behavior observed in non-proliferating confluent biological tissues, where there are no gaps between cells and the packing fraction φ is fixed at precisely unity. For example, zebrafish embryonic explants are confluent three-dimensional tissues where the cells divide slowly and therefore the number of cells per unit volume remains nearly constant. Nevertheless, these tissues exhibit hallmarks of glassy dynamics such as caging behavior and viscoelasticity. Furthermore, ectoderm tissues have longer relaxation timescales than mesendoderm tissues, suggesting ectoderm tissues are closer to a glass transition, despite the fact that both tissue types have the same density [1]. This indicates that there should be an additional parameter controlling glass transitions in confluent ti...