Breaking a Lease Early Without Legal or Financial Trouble

Breaking a lease early can come with big consequences if you’re not careful. However, a lease release can be permissible under certain circumstances. Read below to learn how to break a lease without penalty.

Main Takeaways

• To break a lease early, you should review your lease, seek legal advice, communicate with your landlord, provide written notice, and maybe have someone take over the lease.
• It’s legal to break a lease early when your local laws (and lease agreement) permit it. Some permissible reasons could include landlord misconduct, safety or health violations, active military duties, or domestic violence.
• If you break a lease without following the law or your lease agreement, you could get sued. When you break a lease the right way, you may still have to pay some fees. However, depending on the situation and landlord, it could be possible to waive some of those costs.

Table of Contents

• Is Early Lease Breaking Allowed?
• Legal Reasons for Breaking a Lease Early
• How to Break Your Lease Without Penalty
• Potential Fees for Breaking Your Lease Early
• Other FAQs

Is Early Lease Breaking Allowed?

Tenants’ ability to break a lease agreement depends on the law. More specifically, your area’s laws and your legally binding lease terms shape your lease release rights.

Sometimes, legal agreements have a clause that allows for breaking a lease early if the circumstances permit it. This could include urgent reasons, such as job relocations.

As an alternative, some lease agreements might let you sublease or transfer your lease over to others completely. Other times, landlords or property managers in Northern Virginia may be willing to help you break the lease in a way that benefits all parties.

However, if you break your lease in a manner that violates landlord-tenant rights and responsibilities, you will have broken the lease illegally.

The word “illegally” might stir fear in readers, but it doesn’t mean you will outright go to jail for breaking a lease early. However, it does mean you could get sued, pay penalties, or face other consequences. That is, you could pay the price if you don’t do your due diligence first.

Legal Reasons for Breaking a Lease Early

A few legal reasons make breaking a lease early possible, without severe negative impacts.

Health or Safety Code Violations

If your landlord insufficiently fixes big health or safety code violations, you could have legal grounds for breaking a lease early.

For example, pest infestations, mold, lead paint issues, poor heating, or other conditions pose a threat to your health and safety.

First, though, you must follow proper procedures by notifying the landlord in writing and giving them a reasonable amount of time to fix these problems.

Landlord Harassment or Privacy Violations

Landlord harassment, threats, violence, or repeated privacy violations can foster a difficult living environment, which may make breaking a lease early possible. For example, such issues can include landlords who enter your home or change locks without notice, cut off utilities or amenities, or threaten you.

However, before breaking a lease, you must document what happened, notify your landlord, and check local laws for applicable processes you must follow.

As a warning, if your landlord feels that your allegations don’t have merit, they may take you to court. As such, it’s important to be meticulous in your documentation.

Active Military Duty

The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) allows service members to conduct a lease release without penalty. That is, they can do so if they receive a permanent change of station (PCS) order or a deployment order that lasts for a specific period.

If this happens, you should give your landlord a copy of the military orders and comply with SCRA-outlined notification requirements. In addition, you must give your landlord a minimum of 30 days’ notice and be deployed at least 90 days. In addition, service members should prove they signed their lease prior to their call to active duty.

Domestic Violence or Abuse

Some states have clauses permitting domestic violence or abuse victims to break a lease without penalty. These laws usually require tenants to provide documentation, such as a protective order or police report, as proof of genuine need.

If you’re in this situation, research the specific laws in your jurisdiction and work with local support services if needed. In that vein, be sure to give your landlord or property manager advance written notice, typically 30 days. Then, you’ll have a specified period to move out (also usually 30 days) and find a safe place to live.

How to Break Your Lease Without Penalty

To know how to break your lease without penalty, you’ll want to learn the steps you must take to avoid law and lease breaking. Here they are:

Review Your Lease

To start your lease release, you should review your lease agreement first. See if it has an early termination clause that allows for breaking a lease early. However, be aware you may still be required to pay penalty fees and your full security deposit.

Also, depending on your jurisdiction’s landlord-tenant laws, such as new North Virginia landlord-tenant laws, you may have extra restrictions and regulations.

Seek Legal Advice

If your rights and responsibilities are unclear, or if you experience challenges with your landlord, it might be best to get legal advice. They can help you identify your rights, possible liabilities, and ways to deal with them.

Communicate With Your Landlord

To cover all legal bases, you need to maintain consistent, clear communication with your landlord or property manager prior to moving.

Here, you should be honest about why breaking a lease early is essential for you. This will make your decision easier for your landlord to understand. It also could help you two resolve the issue in a mutually beneficial way.

Before reaching out to your landlord, you should have all your move-out plans sorted out. This should include your move-out timing and your plan to offset any financial damages they may face from the rental income loss. Then, you can notify them of all the incoming changes.

Provide Written Notice

No matter your discussions with your landlords earlier, you must provide documented, written notice of intent for lease release. By doing this, you have a paper trail for the whole process. You should include specifics like your moving date and solutions to issues that might concern your landlord, like finding new tenants.

Find Someone to Take Over the Lease

This step is optional but highly recommended. You can compensate for any landlord financial losses by subletting your unit. This way, the subletter will handle your unit’s rent. You’re happy, and your landlord’s happy.

However, you need to first double-check to ensure your lease terms and conditions permit for subleasing. In addition, you must keep your landlord in the loop to ensure they can approve the new tenant. Furthermore, make sure your subletting practices follow any policies outlined in your lease agreement.

Of course, this comes with an asterisk. If your new tenant damages the property or doesn’t pay the rent, you will be liable for those problems. Instead, you can ask your landlord to start anew with this tenant, with an entirely different lease. This may not be possible for your landlord to do so last minute, but it can’t hurt to ask.

Potential Fees for Breaking Your Lease Early

As we said before, if you undergo a lease release without following your lease contract or local laws, your landlord could sue you. The case could go to small claims court, where the court could rule against you.

Whether or not you lease release the right way, you still may have to pay some fees. These may sound disappointing, but they’re small compared to the trouble you could get with an unauthorized lease release. Furthermore, if you use solutions like subletting, you could possibly have some of these fees waived.

Either way, let’s get into the fees you might encounter.

• Loss of Security Deposit- Landlords may keep some or all of a tenant’s security deposit to cover unpaid rent, damages, or other costs associated with breaking the lease. Or, if the deposit doesn’t cover all the costs, you may have to pay extra fees.
• Early Termination Fees- Some rental agreements have a clause that requires early movers to pay an early termination fee. The amount varies by landlord and property manager.
• Remaining Rent Obligations- On a similar note, you may be on the hook for paying the remaining rent for the duration of the lease. Or, landlords may expect you to cover rent payments until they find a new tenant.

Other FAQs

How Does a Lease Release Affect Your Rental History?

After breaking a lease early, you may experience a negative entry on your rental history or similarly negative references.

If future landlords see you’ve broken a lease agreement, it could impact their evaluation of your rental application. However, it may help if you tactfully explain why your lease release was strictly necessary. Transparency and honesty can go a long way.

Does Breaking a Lease Early Impact Your Credit Report?

Unfortunately, yes. Breaking a lease early and failing to pay rent could negatively affect your credit score. For example, if your landlord reports your late payments to the credit bureaus, it could appear on your credit report and bring your score down.

Can You Break a Lease for Medical Reasons?

It depends. If your lease terms allow for it, or your local laws do, you possibly could leave your rental without significant consequences. However, if regulations don’t cover this issue, you might want to have an open discussion with your landlord. This way, you can find a solution that works for everyone involved.

Can I Break My Lease if I Lose My Job?

Again, this depends on your lease agreement. Perhaps, for instance, your lease has a provision that allows for a lease release in the event of financial hardship. If not, as we said before, it might be a good idea to talk to your landlord about your situation and find a solution.

Your landlord could even perhaps reduce your rent temporarily so you can afford it until you find a new job. Some landlords feel short-term price cuts are a small price to pay for holding onto a genuinely good tenant.

Is It Better to Get Evicted or Break a Lease?

It’s usually better to break a lease than to get evicted.

After all, evictions are very stigmatized. They’re usually associated with serious offenses, such as criminal activity, property damage, or other misconduct. Furthermore, most landlords find the eviction process to be exceptionally costly and stressful. It’s an action they only take if they have no other choice.

So, if you have something as huge as an eviction on your record, it will really stick out.

Handle Breaking a Lease Early With BMG

Deciding whether breaking a lease early works for you, as well as knowing how to do it legally and landlord-compliantly, are tough asks. In the end, it all really boils down to your local laws and your lease agreement. These policies ultimately decide your eligibility for a lease release.

If you need advice on how to break a lease without penalty, Bay Property Management Group can help. We are not lawyers, to be clear. However, we do have years of experience with hundreds of tenants. This legacy includes solving sticky landlord-tenant issues, crafting and following lease agreements, and ensuring compliance with relevant laws.

As such, we may have some wisdom to better inform your choices. What’s more, we have a convenient home listing site. This way, you can get a jumpstart looking for your next place to live.

On the other hand, if you’re a landlord, we can help you make sure that all parties develop a solution that truly works for everyone. Outside of that, we can handle everything from new tenant screening, to move-in and move-out procedures, to conflict resolution and evictions. Contact us today to streamline your rental experience.