In this paper, stability of human in the loop model reference adaptive control architectures is analyzed. For a general class of linear human models with time-delay, a fundamental stability limit of these architectures is established, which depends on the parameters of this human model as well as the reference model parameters of the adaptive controller. It is shown that when the given set of human model and reference model parameters satisfy this stability limit, the closed-loop system trajectories are guaranteed to be stable. © 2017, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc, AIAA. All rights reserved.