Lease Compliance Check
Using a lease you found online or inherited from the last owner? Paste it in and we'll flag the clauses landlords most often get wrong — late fees, deposits, entry notice, and more.
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Where problem clauses come from
Almost nobody writes a lease from scratch. It came from a template site, from the previous owner, from a landlord association, or from a friend who has been renting out a duplex since 2014. Each of those has the same failure mode: the document was correct for somewhere, at some point, and it has been copied sideways ever since.
The result is a lease that reads fluently and confidently and contains a handful of clauses that don’t match where the property actually is. Those clauses are invisible right up until the moment they matter, which is generally the moment a tenancy is ending badly.
The four that turn up most often:
- A late fee with a number in it. Usually copied from a state with a different rule, or from no state at all. See the late fee checker for what makes one defensible.
- A deposit return deadline. Thirty days is correct in a lot of states, which is exactly why it gets copied into leases for California, where §1950.5 allows 21. Copying the longer number means missing the deadline while believing you met it.
- A blanket “non-refundable cleaning fee”. Many states restrict or prohibit these. It survives in templates because it sounds administrative rather than legal.
- An entry clause that waives notice. “Landlord may enter at any time” is common in older templates and may conflict with your state’s entry rules. Its more reliable cost is presentational: it makes a reasonable landlord look unreasonable in front of anyone reading the document later.
What a clean result does and doesn’t mean
This is the part worth reading before your findings rather than after. The checker returns a handful of clauses worth a second look, roughly in the order it thinks matters most. It is not an approval, and a short list is not a clean bill of health — it always returns a few findings, so getting some back is the normal outcome rather than a signal about your lease.
It can spot an absent clause, but not a missing local requirement. On a lease short enough to read in full, it will flag one with no deposit section or nothing about entry. What it can’t tell you is what your state or city requires that isn’t there — it doesn’t work from a checklist of statutory clauses, so “nothing flagged as missing” is not the same as “nothing missing”. On a longer lease it won’t call anything missing at all, because it hasn’t seen the whole document.
A long lease is reviewed in part, and it says so. The first 12,000 characters go to the review — roughly 2,000 words, or the first several pages. A longer document is cut there. When that happens the result says so before the findings and tells you how much was read, because a partial review that looks like a full one is the version that does harm. If the clause you’re worried about is deep in the document, paste that section on its own.
It doesn’t know your city. Rent control, just-cause eviction rules, local registration schemes and inspection ordinances vary by municipality and sometimes by building. A lease can be perfectly fine statewide and non-compliant three miles away.
It doesn’t know your situation. Whether the unit is subsidised, owner-occupied, a single room, or inherited with a sitting tenant all change which rules apply. The document doesn’t say and the checker can’t ask.
Treat every finding as a question to take to a lawyer or your local landlord association, not as an answer. That’s worth real money even so — an hour of legal time spent on four specific clauses goes considerably further than an hour spent reading the whole document cold.
If your property is in California
California is the one jurisdiction whose deposit statute we have read line by line and check our figures against, so the deposit clauses in a California lease are worth comparing against a source rather than a summary. Civil Code §1950.5 sets the return deadline at 21 calendar days from when the tenant vacated — not 30, and not from when repairs finish — and for every tenancy ending since April 1, 2025 it requires photographs before any deduction.
The photo checker works out which of the two photo duties applies to a given tenancy, and the deadline calculator gives you the date. Both are free and neither asks for an account.
This is general information, not legal advice about your situation, and we are not lawyers. The checker highlights clauses commonly worth reviewing; it does not determine whether any clause is enforceable where your property is, and nothing it returns — or fails to return — amounts to approval of your lease. Have a lawyer review a lease you intend to rely on.