Free New Hampshire Residential Lease Agreement

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A configurable New Hampshire residential lease agreement that generates a signable multi-page PDF. Built to RSA 540 and RSA 540-A — the one-month deposit cap and the owner-occupied exclusion that switches it off, the consent-based entry rule, and the end-of-lease eviction ground in force since 1 July 2026.

New Hampshire RSA 540-A Restricted Property Rules Free PDF 2026 Edition

A New Hampshire residential lease agreement is the written contract governed by two short chapters of the Revised Statutes Annotated: RSA 540, headed Actions Against Tenants, which controls how a tenancy ends, and RSA 540-A, headed Prohibited Practices and Security Deposits, which controls the deposit and what a landlord may never do. A third chapter, RSA 48-A, supplies the minimum housing standards that a habitability defence is measured against. New Hampshire drafts differently from its neighbours. It caps the deposit at one month’s rent or one hundred dollars, whichever is greater, and then removes whole classes of small landlord from the deposit rules altogether. It fixes no hour count for landlord entry, requiring consent instead. It fixes no grace period and no late-fee ceiling. And it splits every rental in the state into restricted and nonrestricted property, which decides whether a landlord needs a reason to evict at all. On 1 July 2026 that last rule changed: the expiry of a lease of twelve months or longer is now itself a ground of eviction, on sixty days’ notice.

Complete the fields below to generate a New Hampshire residential lease agreement as a signable multi-page PDF. Every field you fill is written into the document, including the utility and snow allocations, the deposit account, the methamphetamine and utility-tariff statements and each disclosure you check, and the generated lease cites the controlling section of the Revised Statutes Annotated at each point. Before handing over keys, run proper tenant screening — and note that New Hampshire regulates the fee side of screening under RSA 540-A:3, VIII. Pair the signed lease with a New Hampshire move-in / move-out checklist, because the five-day condition list in RSA 540-A:6 is the record that makes an end-of-tenancy deduction defensible.

New Hampshire recognises the ordinary range — a fixed-term lease, a month-to-month tenancy at will, a room rental, a sublease, a roommate agreement and a commercial lease — but the distinctions that carry legal weight here are not the ones the form names suggest.

The first is between a written lease and a tenancy at will. RSA 540:1 supplies the background rule in a single sentence: “Every tenancy or occupancy shall be deemed to be at will, and the rent payable upon demand, unless a different contract is shown.” A written lease is that different contract. The practical consequence changed on 1 July 2026, because RSA 540:2, II(i) now gives a landlord an end-of-term ground of eviction that exists only where there is a lease of twelve months or longer. An oral or month-to-month arrangement forfeits it.

The second is between restricted and nonrestricted property under RSA 540:1-a, and it is the most important structural fact in New Hampshire landlord-tenant law. It decides whether the landlord needs a reason to end the tenancy. It is covered in full in its own section below.

The third is between a tenancy governed by RSA 540 at all and one that is not. RSA 540:1-a, IV excludes a long list from the chapter entirely, and two of the exclusions matter to ordinary residential landlords. RSA 540-B governs a shared facility — property rented for residential purposes with separate sleeping areas where each occupant shares a kitchen, dining area, bathroom or bathing area with the owner and has no rented right of sole personal use of them. RSA 540-C governs a vacation or recreational rental unit that is rented for vacation use at least one month a year and also let, in the off-season, to people who have no other residence. Both have their own termination and deposit rules, and neither uses the RSA 540 eviction process.

One drafting note. Nothing in New Hampshire law requires a residential lease to be notarized or witnessed. But an oral agreement for a term longer than a year runs into RSA 506:2, the statute of frauds, which requires an agreement that is not to be performed within one year to be in writing and signed by the party to be charged. If the parties intend a year or more, the year should be on paper — and after 1 July 2026 there is a second reason to put it there.

Restricted property is residential rental property that a landlord may only evict from for a listed reason. Nonrestricted property is everything else, and its owner needs no reason at all. RSA 540:1-a, I defines nonrestricted property as all real property rented for nonresidential purposes plus three categories of residential property:

• Single-family houses, if the owner of such a house does not own more than three single-family houses at any one time.
• Rental units in an owner-occupied building containing a total of four dwelling units or fewer.
• Single-family houses acquired by banks or other mortgagees through foreclosure.

RSA 540:1-a, II then defines restricted property as all other residential rental property. The consequence sits in RSA 540:2. Under paragraph I, the lessor or owner of nonrestricted property “may terminate any tenancy by giving to the tenant or occupant a notice in writing to quit the premises in accordance with RSA 540:3 and 5” — and no reason need be given or stated. Under paragraph II, the owner of restricted property may terminate only for one of the enumerated grounds.

Two points about that division are constantly missed. The first is that the four-unit owner-occupied line is not the same as the five-unit owner-occupied line in the security deposit chapter, and neither is the same as the “no other rental property” test that appears alongside it. A landlord who lives in a four-unit building is nonrestricted for eviction purposes and outside the deposit rules; a landlord who lives in a five-unit building is restricted for eviction purposes but still outside the deposit rules. The second is that everything other than the need for a reason applies to nonrestricted property in full: the notice periods in RSA 540:3, the specificity requirement, the service rules in RSA 540:5, the tenant’s pay-and-stay right in RSA 540:9, the retaliation defence in RSA 540:13-a and the fitness defence in RSA 540:13-d.

RSA 540:1-a, IV removes a long list of occupancies from the definition of a tenancy and provides that the whole of RSA 540 does not apply to them. A landlord who assumes the eviction chapter governs, and serves a notice under it, may be following the wrong process entirely. The list is:

• Rooms in rooming or boarding houses rented to transient guests for fewer than ninety consecutive days. The statute carries an anti-avoidance rule: where the owner directs an occupant to move from one room to another in the same house, or to another of the owner’s houses, the ninety-day count is not broken. A voluntary move made at the occupant’s own written request, after being told of the exemption, does break it, and the statute prescribes the wording of that request.
• Rooms in hotels, motels, inns, tourist homes and other dwellings rented for recreational or vacation use.
• Rooms in student dormitories, nursing homes, hospitals and any other facility licensed under RSA 151 or certified under RSA 126-A, and convents, monasteries, asylums or group homes.
• A single-family home in which the occupant has no lease and which is the primary and usual residence of the owner — the classic spare-room arrangement in the owner’s own house.
• Residential real estate under RSA 540-B, shared facilities.
• Vacation or recreational rental units under RSA 540-C.
• Residential units leased by a member of a fraternal or social organisation providing student housing in a structure the organisation owns and operates.
• Occupancies in which the occupant is hired to provide care or assistance for a person with disabilities. There the person with disabilities or their guardian may order the caregiver to vacate without legal process on not less than seventy-two hours written notice, provided a written agreement authorises summary ejection and any compensation owed beyond free housing is paid before the caregiver leaves.

A shared facility is worth pausing on, because the deposit rule is completely different. Under RSA 540-B:10 the owner may require a deposit “in an amount to be determined by the owner” — there is no cap. If the deposit exceeds the equivalent of thirty days’ rent, there must be a written instrument acknowledging receipt and explaining where the deposit will be maintained and when it will be returned. And if there is no written agreement at all, the deposit must be returned within twenty days after the occupant vacates. Termination under RSA 540-B:3 needs a written notice of thirty days for no reason, seven days for nonpayment, or seventy-two hours for damage to the premises, behaviour adversely affecting the health or safety of other occupants or the owner, or a material breach of the rental agreement. RSA 540-B:7 gives shared-facility occupants the RSA 540-A:4 remedies, provided the petition says the rental is governed by RSA 540-B.

One month’s rent or one hundred dollars, whichever is greater. RSA 540-A:6, I(a) puts it plainly: a landlord shall not demand or receive any security deposit in an amount or value in excess of one month’s rent or one hundred dollars, whichever is greater. Nothing prevents a written lease requiring quarterly or less frequent rent payments, but where it does, the deposit received in addition to the initial rent payment may still not exceed the equivalent of one month’s rent.

The definition is what gives the cap its bite. RSA 540-A:5, II says a security deposit means all funds in excess of the monthly rent which are transferred from the tenant to the landlord for any purpose. That is a functional test with no exceptions written into it, so a pet deposit, a key deposit, a cleaning deposit and last month’s rent collected at signing all count toward the same single ceiling. First month’s rent is rent and is not caught; last month’s rent taken up front is.

A bill of the 2026 session would have changed this. HB 1336 would have created a category called a “regulated conditional deposit”, letting a landlord collect up to an additional month’s rent from an applicant who did not fully meet the landlord’s screening criteria. It was vetoed on 2 July 2026, and would have taken effect on 1 January 2027. A veto-override session is scheduled for 19 August 2026 with the bill on the agenda, so a landlord reading this after that date should check the outcome. As matters stand the ceiling is unchanged. Our New Hampshire security deposit laws guide tracks it.

No, and the exception is large enough to swallow a great deal of New Hampshire’s housing stock. This is the single biggest gap in the competing coverage, and it sits not in an exemption section but inside a definition. RSA 540-A:5, I defines “landlord” for the security deposit subdivision and then removes two classes of owner from it:

Three things follow, and each of them changes what a lease can honestly promise.

First, the exclusion is total within its scope. A landlord outside the definition is not bound by the one-month cap, the signed receipt, the trust-account duty, the interest rule, the thirty-day return, the itemisation requirement or the double-damages remedy. RSA 540-A:5 through RSA 540-A:8 simply do not reach that tenancy. That is why this generator asks the questions it asks: a lease that recites a statutory cap which does not apply is not being cautious, it is being inaccurate, and it invites a dispute about which rules the parties actually agreed to.

Second, the single-family limb is narrower than it looks. It requires the landlord to own no other rental property at all. A landlord who lets out one house and one condominium is inside the subdivision for both. The unit-count limb is the more forgiving one: an owner-occupied building of five units or fewer, with no test of what else the owner holds.

Third, there is a carve-back, and no competing page anywhere mentions it. The exclusion does not apply to any individual unit occupied by a person sixty years of age or older. It operates unit by unit, not building by building. In an owner-occupied fourplex where one tenant is sixty-five, that unit is governed by the full deposit rules — cap, receipt, trust account, interest, thirty-day return and double damages — while the other three units are not. A landlord in that position is running two regimes in one building.

What the exclusion does not touch is just as important. It is written “for the purposes of this subdivision” and reaches no further. RSA 540-A:1 through RSA 540-A:4 — quiet enjoyment, the ban on utility shutoff and lockout, the entry rule, the seven-day storage duty, the application fee disclosure and the electronic payment rule — bind every landlord in the state. So does the whole of RSA 540, and so does RSA 48-A:14, which uses the wide RSA 540-A:1, I definition of landlord with no small-landlord exception at all.

In trust — but not necessarily in a separate account, and not necessarily in an interest-bearing one. RSA 540-A:6, II(a) provides that security deposits “continue to be the money of the tenant and shall be held in trust by the person with whom such deposit is made and shall not be mingled with the personal moneys or become an asset of the landlord” until RSA 540-A:7 is complied with.

Paragraph II(b) then permits what a great deal of secondary coverage denies: a landlord may mingle all security deposits held by that landlord in a single account held in trust for the tenants at any bank, savings and loan association or credit union organised under the laws of New Hampshire. There is no requirement of one account per tenant. There is no requirement that the account bear interest. What is forbidden is mixing tenant money with the landlord’s own.

Paragraph II(c) supplies a third route that almost nobody writes about. A bond written by a company located in New Hampshire and posted with the clerk of the city or town in which the premises are located, in an amount equivalent to the total value of the deposits the landlord holds on property in that municipality, exempts the landlord from paragraphs II(a) and II(b) altogether. A landlord using that route holds no trust account at all.

Then there is what happens when the building changes hands. RSA 540-A:6, III requires a landlord holding a deposit to turn it over — at the time of delivery of the deed or instrument of assignment, or within five days thereafter, or within five days after a receiver has qualified — to the grantee on a conveyance, the assignee on an assignment of the lease, the receiver in a foreclosure or other lien action, or the purchaser at a foreclosure sale where no receiver has qualified. The landlord must then notify the tenant by registered or certified mail, giving the name and address of the person who now holds the money. A landlord who does that, with any interest due, is relieved of liability, and the transferee becomes responsible for the return.

Only where the deposit is held for one year or longer. RSA 540-A:6, IV(a) requires a landlord who holds a deposit for a period of one year or longer to pay the tenant interest at a rate equal to the interest paid on regular savings accounts at the New Hampshire bank, savings and loan association or credit union in which it is deposited, running from the date the landlord received the deposit. Where deposits are mingled in a single trust account under II(b), the landlord pays the actual interest earned on that account proportionately to each tenant. A tenancy shorter than a year carries no interest obligation at all.

Two tenant rights hang off the same paragraph and they are worth putting in the lease. Under IV(b), on request the landlord must provide the name of the institution, the account number, the amount on d