Free lease renewal agreement template

How to fill it in

Most of this is dates and numbers. Four fields do the real work.

• Recite the document chain. Name the original lease by date and list every amendment and addendum. If you only reference "the lease", nobody can tell later which version of a clause applies.
• Term dates: set the start and end explicitly. If you are signing after the old term already expired, complete the gap clause rather than backdating anything.
• Rent: state the new figure and the old one. Do not leave any rent "to be agreed" later, including for an option term. Courts frequently refuse to enforce an option where the rent still has to be negotiated, so give an amount or a formula.
• Deposit: decide whether it carries over or gets topped up. If it is topped up, check your state's cap, which is usually a multiple of the new rent.
• Guarantor: if there is one, have them sign the confirmation block. This is the single most valuable minute you will spend on the document.
• Changes: list each change against the section of the original lease it replaces. "Section 12 is replaced with..." beats a floating new paragraph.
• Before you send it: check the notice period your state requires for the rent increase, and check whether the unit is rent-regulated.

Renewal or extension? The distinction most templates skip

These are treated as synonyms in everyday use and they are not the same thing. As one summary of the rule puts it, an extension is "a stretching or spreading out of the term of the lease", while a renewal "creates a new and distinct tenancy and is not merely a perpetuation of the old tenancy". You will also see the shorthand that a renewal changes terms while an extension does not. That is a rule of thumb rather than the legal test. The test is whether a new tenancy has been created.

• Guarantors are the practical consequence, and the reason this matters to most readers. If a renewal creates a new tenancy, a guaranty that only covered the original one may not reach it.
• Interests recorded during the earlier term can also be affected. In California, a new lease created by renewal has been described as subordinate to encumbrances such as mortgages, judgments or tax liens recorded during the prior term, while a modified lease under an extension is not. Those cases are Californian, so do not assume the same result in your state. It is still worth asking the question where a mortgage or lien is in the picture.
• Changes in law can attach to a new tenancy in the same way.
• What to do about it: say which one you mean, in words, in the document. This template renews by default and tells you where to switch it. Do not rely on the title of the document to carry the meaning.

What happens if nobody signs anything

A fixed term ending does not evict anybody. If the tenant stays and the landlord keeps accepting rent, a periodic tenancy generally arises, usually month to month, on the terms of the old lease so far as they still fit. If the landlord wants possession instead, the landlord refuses rent and serves the required notice. So nothing about the end of a fixed term is automatic. The landlord makes a choice, and the state's notice rules govern what that choice requires. There is one consequence that catches tenants out. A renewal option almost always has to be exercised inside a window that closes before the term ends, so a tenant who drifts past the expiry date intending to sort the paperwork out later has usually already missed it. Once the fixed term has gone and the tenancy has become periodic, the option in the old lease is generally spent. Check the option window first and the calendar second.

• The notice needed to end a month-to-month tenancy varies far more than people expect. Colorado requires 91 days where the tenancy has lasted a year or more, on a sliding scale down to a single day for a tenancy under a week.
• California requires 60 days, or 30 days where the tenant has lived there less than a year.
• New York scales by how long the tenant has occupied: 30 days under a year, 60 days between one and two years, and 90 days beyond two years. If the landlord gives late notice, the tenancy continues on the existing terms.
• Florida requires 60 days to end a year-to-year tenancy and 30 days for month-to-month, raised from 15 days by a 2023 amendment.
• Texas is the outlier worth knowing: the statutory period is the later of the date in the notice or one month, but the parties may agree in a signed instrument to a different period, or to no notice at all. Read the lease before you rely on the statute.
• Arizona requires 30 days for month-to-month and 10 days for week-to-week.

Renewal options: exercise them exactly

If the original lease gives the tenant an option to renew, that option is a contractual right with conditions attached, and courts hold the party exercising it to strict compliance. The window matters, the method matters, and the wording has to be unequivocal. If the lease says certified mail, send certified mail. If the window closes 90 days before expiry, a notice on day 89 is late. Equitable relief is sometimes available: in the New York case J.N.A. Realty Corp. v. Cross Bay Chelsea, Inc., 42 N.Y.2d 392 (1977), a tenant who was late through negligence was allowed relief where the failure was an honest mistake, the tenant faced a substantial forfeiture, and the landlord was not prejudiced. Relief like that is exceptional, and several states do not offer it.

• Diarise the option window from the lease, not from memory, and note the required method of delivery.
• Exercise unconditionally. "We would like to renew if we can agree the rent" is not an exercise of an option, it is an invitation to negotiate.
• Check whether the option sets the rent. If it leaves rent to be agreed, the option may be unenforceable for uncertainty, which is the single most common way an option dies.
• Do not assume a renewal carries a further option. Courts disfavour perpetual renewals and ambiguous language is generally read as giving one renewal only.
• Once exercised, document it with this agreement. An exercised option still needs the new term recorded.

Raising the rent, and the notice you owe

The increase itself is usually the easy part. The notice period is where renewals fail, and it is not the same as the notice period for ending a tenancy. Several states scale the notice by the size of the increase, which means the same letter can be valid at one number and void at another.

• California requires 30 days notice for an increase of 10% or less, and 90 days where the increase exceeds 10% of the rent charged at any time in the previous 12 months.
• New York ties it to occupancy length, 30, 60 or 90 days, and the same requirement is triggered by any increase of 5% or more.
• Washington moved to 90 days notice for rent increases in 2025, up from 60, with a shorter 30-day rule for certain income-based housing.
• Colorado requires a flat 60 days where there is no written agreement. It is not tiered by percentage. If you have read that Colorado uses a 30-day or 60-day split at a 10% threshold, that is California's rule misattributed.
• Arizona's landlord-tenant statute sets notice periods for ending a tenancy but does not address rent increases, and Texas has no general statutory rent-increase notice period either. In both, the lease terms and any local ordinance do the work, so check both rather than assuming there is no requirement.
• The practical rule: check the number and the notice together, because in several states the number decides the notice.

Where renewing is not the landlord's choice

This template assumes a landlord who may renew or not. In a growing number of places that assumption is wrong, and using a generic form can itself be the violation. As of 2026 four US jurisdictions have statewide or district-wide rent regulation: California, Oregon, Washington and the District of Columbia. Washington's is recent enough that many template pages have not caught up.

• NEW YORK CITY, rent-stabilized units: the owner must offer a renewal lease not more than 150 and not less than 90 days before the existing lease expires, and the tenant then has 60 days to accept. The offer goes on the state's prescribed form, RTP-8, with a separate variant for ETPA-covered units. A generic renewal agreement is not a substitute. The permitted increase is set annually by the Rent Guidelines Board in orders keyed to the lease commencement date, and the rate changes on 1 October each year, so check the order that applies to your commencement date rather than reusing last year's number.
• NEW YORK STATE, Good Cause Eviction: applies to non-stabilized units in New York City and in municipalities that have opted in, 19 of them as of the state's May 2026 fact sheet. It carries an exemption threshold tied to fair market rent.
• CALIFORNIA: the Tenant Protection Act caps annual increases at 5% plus regional CPI, or 10%, whichever is lower, measured against the lowest gross rent charged in the previous 12 months, and it is currently set to sunset on 1 January 2030. Separately, the just-cause rules apply once a tenant has occupied for 12 months, and one of the listed grounds is the tenant's refusal to execute a written renewal on similar terms, which presupposes the landlord offering one. A covered California landlord generally cannot simply decline to renew. A 2025 amendment now allows the required just-cause notice to sit inside the lease itself rather than only as a separate addendum.
• A note on California, because it has been widely misreported: a 2026 bill that would have cut the cap to the lower of 2% plus CPI or 5% and removed the sunset did not pass. It failed in committee in January 2026 and died. The cap, the exemptions and the sunset are unchanged.
• OREGON: the maximum increase for general residential tenancies in 2026 is 9.5%, down from 10.0% in 2025, under a formula of the lesser of 10% or 7% plus CPI. A separate and lower figure of 6% applies in 2026 to manufactured dwelling facilities with more than 30 spaces. These are different categories and are frequently conflated. The state publishes the following year's figure by 30 September.
• WASHINGTON: statewide rent stabilization took effect in May 2025. Increases are capped at seven percent plus CPI, or 10 percent, whichever is less, with no increase permitted during the first 12 months of a tenancy, and the law sunsets on 1 July 2040. The published maximum for 2026 is 9.683%. Exemptions include buildings whose first certificate of occupancy was issued 12 or fewer years ago, certain owner-occupied properties, public housing authorities and regulated nonprofits, and LIHTC units. The exemptions are not available to REITs or corporate owners. Washington also has statewide just-cause protection.

The guarantor trap

This is the reason to use a renewal form with a guarantor block rather than a bare one-page letter. A guaranty is a separate contract, and whether it reaches a renewed term depends on what that contract says. A guaranty that expressly covers future terms, renewals and extensions normally survives. One that does not is a live argument, and ambiguity in a guaranty is generally construed against the party who drafted it, which is almost always the landlord. Where the renewal materially changes the deal, a rent increase being the obvious example, there is a real risk a court treats the renewal as a new agreement that the guarantor never guaranteed. The fix takes one signature.

• Have the guarantor sign the renewal itself, confirming the guaranty continues and applies to the new rent. This template includes that block.
• Do not rely on the original guaranty's wording unless you have re-read it. "This guaranty applies to the lease" is not the same as "and to any renewal or extension of it".
• State the new rent inside the guarantor confirmation, so the guarantor is confirming a known figure rather than an open-ended obligation.
• A guarantor who refuses to sign has told you something worth knowing. Decide whether you are comfortable renewing without the guarantee, and price the decision accordingly.
• For the tenant's side: if you are the guarantor, a renewal is a natural moment to ask to be released, particularly if the original guaranty is silent about renewals.

The security deposit at renewal

Two questions come up. Does the existing deposit carry over, and can the landlord ask for more when the rent goes up? The first is usually straightforward: the deposit continues to be held under the original lease unless the parties agree otherwise, and this template records that. The second depends entirely on your state, because deposit caps are commonly expressed as a multiple of rent, which means a rent increase mechanically raises the ceiling. California is the clearest worked example. Its cap is one month's rent, with a two-month exception for a landlord who is a natural person, or a limited liability company whose members are all natural persons, and who owns no more than two residential rental properties containing no more than four dwelling units in total. Because that cap is a multiple of rent, a rent increase at renewal raises the maximum, so a top-up can be lawful there. The statute was amended with effect from 1 January 2026, though that amendment changed how deposits must be returned rather than how much may be held.

• Check your own state's cap before asking for a top-up, and calculate it on the new rent, not the old one.
• Deposit caps and top-up rules vary enough that we have deliberately not published a state-by-state table here. Several widely circulated tables are wrong, including claims of statewide caps in states that have none.
• Whether a landlord may demand a mid-tenancy top-up at all is genuinely unsettled in some states, even where the arithmetic allows it. If the amount is significant, take advice rather than relying on a template.
• Document the top-up in the renewal, with the amount and the date it is due, rather than collecting it informally.
• Interest and separate-account rules usually continue to apply to the whole deposit, including any top-up.

What carries over, and what you have to restate

Most renewals rest on a single sentence: all other terms remain in full force and effect. It is convenient and it is usually fine, but it does three things people do not intend. It silently re-ratifies every clause in the original lease, including any the parties have stopped following in practice. It creates ambiguity wherever the renewal and the original disagree, unless you say which one wins. And where there have been amendments along the way, it fails to identify which documents make up the agreement at all.

• Add an order-of-precedence line. This template says the renewal controls over the original lease, and over earlier amendments.
• Recite the full document chain by date, including every amendment and addendum.
• List changes against the section they replace, rather than adding free-floating new paragraphs.
• A renewal term longer than one year should be in writing in most states, because a lease for more than a year falls within the statute of frauds. This is a written document, so that is handled, but do not agree a long renewal by text message and paper it later.
• On lead-based paint, federal law treats a renewal as covered but gives a narrow exemption: a further disclosure is not required where the landlord already gave all the required information and no new information about lead-based paint or hazards has since come into the landlord's possession. New information revives the duty. That second half is the part almost nobody mentions.

Commercial renewals are a different animal

This template is written for residential tenancies. A commercial renewal shares the same skeleton but the risk sits in different places, and a short form like this one is usually not enough. Operating expense and CAM reconciliations, percentage rent, tenant improvement allowances, assignment and subletting consents, exclusive use provisions, personal guarantees from principals, and estoppel or subordination obligations to a lender all commonly need attention at renewal. Commercial tenants also rarely enjoy the statutory protections above: the notice periods, just-cause rules and rent caps described on this page are residential. If you are renewing a commercial lease of any substance, use this as a checklist of what to think about, not as the document you sign.

Common mistakes to avoid

Renewals are short documents that fail in a small number of repeated ways.

• Leaving the rent for a future term "to be agreed", which can make the option unenforceable for uncertainty.
• Not having the guarantor sign, and discovering at enforcement that the guaranty did not cover the renewal.
• Exercising a renewal option late, informally, or by a method the lease did not permit.
• Signing the renewal after the old term already lapsed without recording what governed the gap.
• Relying on "all other terms remain in force" with no precedence clause and no list of amendments.
• Raising the rent on the shorter notice tier when the size of the increase required the longer one.
• Using a generic form for a rent-regulated unit that requires a prescribed government form.
• Topping up the deposit past the state cap after an increase.
• Having only one of several co-tenants sign.
• Declining to renew for a reason that is retaliatory or based on a protected characteristic, or in a just-cause state, for no stated cause at all.
• Assuming the renewal carries another renewal option with it.
• Changing who lives there by pen on a renewal form, when the situation actually needs a new lease.