We demonstrate that the resistivity data of a number of high Tc cuprates, in particular La2−xSrxCuO4, are consistent with resistivity saturation, although the Ioffe-Regel condition is strongly violated. By using the f-sum rule together with calculations of the kinetic energy in the t − J model, we show that the saturation resistivity is unusually large. This is related to the strong reduction of the kinetic energy due to strong correlation effects. The fulfilment of the Ioffe-Regel condition for conventional transition metal compounds is found to be somewhat accidental.Some strongly correlated metals [1][2][3][4], in particular many high T c cuprates [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14], show an exceptionally large resistivity, ρ, at high temperatures T . Thus ρ can reach values of several mΩcm. This is in strong contrast to almost all other metals. Typically, a metal with a very large resistivity shows resistivity saturation [15]. Thus when ρ reaches values of the order 0.1 mΩcm, the slope of ρ(T ) is typically reduced substantially, although not necessarily to zero. This happens when the apparent mean free path l becomes comparable to the separation, d, of two atoms, the Ioffe-Regel condition [16]. This kind of behavior has been observed for many metals and it used to be considered a universal behavior [17].The metals mentioned above and the alkali-doped fullerenes [18] are apparent exceptions to this saturation behavior, with the cuprates forming a particular challenge [19,20]. The deviation from the "universal" behavior can be illustrated by considering Ioffe-Regel condition for La 2−x Sr x CuO 4 . We assume a "large" Fermi surface of cylindrical shape, containing 1 − x electrons (or 1 + x holes) [21]. Assuming that l = a, where a is the lattice parameter in the CuO 2 plane, we obtain the saturation resistivityIf we instead assume a "small" Fermi surface, √ 1 ± x in the denominator is replaced by √ x. In either case, the experimental resistivity for small x is much larger than the saturation resistivity above, supporting the conclusion that there is no saturation in these systems.Here we demonstrate that the experimental data for the strongly correlated high T c cuprates are, nevertheless, consistent with saturation. The saturation resistivity can, however, be much larger than the Ioffe-Regel value. This is not entirely surprising, since the Ioffe-Regel condition is based on a semiclassical picture, which is not valid when l ∼ d. The good agreement between the IoffeRegel condition and the saturation for weakly correlated transition metal compounds is therefore somewhat accidental. The large saturation resistivity is shown to be due to a large reduction of the kinetic energy, due to strong correlation effects. Since the alkali-doped fullerenes appear to lack saturation [22], this puts these compounds in a special class, different from the cuprates.To discuss resistivity saturation, we use the f-sum rule in a form appropriate for the models discussed here (only nearest neighbor hopping and no on-site matrix ele...