Free Michigan Sublease Agreement

Whether you may sublet in Michigan is decided by your lease. We read the landlord-tenant act at MCL 554.601 and following, the general provisions at 554.1 and following, and the summary-proceedings chapter at MCL 600.5701 and following: none creates a right to sublet or a consent standard, and the only mention of a sublessor is a definition. What Michigan does have is an unusually lease-dependent eviction route and two procedural rules worth knowing before you sublet.

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A sublease puts a new occupant into the unit while you stay answerable to the landlord. Michigan treats you as the landlord in that second relationship: MCL § 554.601(a)(i) defines “landlord” to include the owner, lessor or sublessor of a rental unit. As everywhere else in this series, that is a description of the duties you take on rather than a permission. What is distinctive about Michigan is how much rides on the lease document itself: the summary-proceedings route for a breach depends on a power to terminate being in the lease, and the notice period for that route comes from the lease too.

• The names of the original tenant, the subtenant and the landlord
• The address of the rental unit, and the room if only part is sublet
• Start and end dates, ending no later than the master lease
• The rent, the due date and how payment is made
• Any deposit taken from the subtenant and how it is returned
• Whether the landlord consented in writing, and when
• Whether either party has consented to electronic service, and on what address
• That the original tenant remains liable to the landlord

• Assuming there is a statutory cure period. Michigan sets none for a lease breach. MCL § 600.5716 requires the demand to state the remedial time, but that time comes from the lease.
• Treating MCL § 554.601 as a consent rule. It defines “landlord” to include a sublessor, which is about what you owe your subtenant.
• Consenting to electronic service without thinking about it. § 5718(1)(d) makes it optional, and § 5718(2) says a landlord may not refuse to enter a lease because you decline.
• Forgetting that mailed service has its own date rule. Under § 5718(1)(c) the date of service is the next regular mail-delivery day after the day it was mailed.

No. We read the landlord-tenant relationships act at MCL 554.601 to 554.641, the general landlord-tenant provisions at MCL 554.1 and following, and the whole of the summary-proceedings chapter at MCL 600.5701 and following. Fifty-two sections returned text. None of them creates a right to sublet, and none sets a standard for the landlord’s consent.

So the clause in your lease is the rule. What makes Michigan worth reading carefully is not the consent question but the machinery that follows a breach, which leans on the lease far more than most states do.

Michigan lists the circumstances for a summary proceeding in MCL § 600.5714(1), and the list is instructive for what it does not contain.

There is no general “tenant breached a covenant” ground. For an unauthorised sublease the route is (c)(i), and (c)(i) works only if the lease supplies the power to terminate. Notice too that even the controlled-substance ground at (b) is framed as termination pursuant to a clause in the lease. Michigan’s summary-proceedings chapter consistently defers to the document.

The practical consequence for a tenant is that the lease is worth reading closely before you sublet, because it is doing work that a statute does in other states. The practical consequence for a sublessor is that the sublease you are writing should not contradict it.

The demand must state your remedial time. MCL § 600.5716 requires a demand for possession to be in writing, addressed to the person in possession, to identify the premises, and to state clearly both the reasons for the demand and the time to take remedial action. It must be dated and signed. Michigan does not fix that time by statute for a lease breach — it comes from the lease — but the demand has to tell you what it is.

Electronic service is optional and cannot be forced on you. MCL § 600.5718(1) lists the ways a demand may be served: personal delivery; delivery on the premises to a member of the family or household or an employee of suitable age and discretion, with a request that it be passed on; first-class mail; and electronic service.

Both rules reward attention. The mail rule means a demand posted on a Saturday is not served on Saturday. The electronic-service rule means a clause buried in a lease is not enough on its own — the consent must have been sent by one party and affirmatively replied to by the other — and that declining it cannot cost you the tenancy.

Because § 554.601(a)(i) includes a sublessor in the definition, the act’s duties run from you to your subtenant. The deposit is the clearest instance: the statutory obligations attach to what a landlord holds, and in the sublease relationship that is you.

Related, and easy to miss: MCL § 554.614 deals with what happens when a landlord’s interest in the unit ends “by sale, assignment, death, appointment of receiver or otherwise”, and keeps them liable on the deposit until it is either transferred to the successor with written notice to the tenant, or the successor complies. That is a landlord-side rule rather than a sublease rule, but it is the sort of provision that turns up in searches about assignment and gets miscited as one.

Two deposits exist in a sublease and only one of them is statutory.

Read the trigger: termination of occupancy, not termination of the lease. In a sublease those two can fall on different dates, and if you move out while your subtenant stays, whose occupancy has terminated is a question your paperwork should not leave open.

Nothing in § 554.609 reaches the deposit you take from your subtenant. That one lives only in this agreement, so state the amount, what it may be applied to, when the itemisation is due and when the balance comes back. Borrowing the thirty-day figure is a sensible choice that lines the two ends of the chain up — but it is a term you are agreeing, not a duty the statute imposes on you, and the sublease should say so rather than implying the statute does the work.

Many subleases are periodic rather than for a fixed term, and Michigan has a specific rule for ending one.

One month’s notice is not the same thing as thirty days, and in a thirty-one day month the difference is real. The second sentence matters more in a sublease than people expect: where rent is payable weekly — which room-share arrangements sometimes are — the notice needed is a week, not a month. Decide which arrangement you are creating and write the notice period into the sublease so neither side has to work it out later.

One further definition is worth knowing before you conclude that an informal arrangement sits outside all of this. MCL § 600.5701(c) provides that, for the summary-proceedings chapter, “Lease” includes a written or verbal lease or licence agreement for use or possession of premises. A handshake room-share with rent going into a shared account is capable of being a lease for these purposes. The absence of a document does not put the arrangement outside the chapter; it just means nobody can prove what was agreed — which is an argument for writing it down rather than against it.

A sublease rarely arrives on its own. Most people reach one because something else has changed — a job in another city, a relationship ending, a lease with months left on it — so it is worth knowing what the alternatives cost before you commit to this one. Our guide to breaking a lease in Michigan sets out the early-exit routes and what each of them exposes you to, and in some situations ending the tenancy outright is cleaner than running a sublease you will have to manage from a distance.

The two disputes that actually follow a sublease are about money and about possession. On money, the deposit is where most of it happens, and the rules that govern what a landlord may take and when it has to come back are set out in Michigan security deposit laws — worth reading before you decide what to hold from your subtenant, and before you assume you know what the owner may hold from you.

On possession, the notices and timelines that apply if things go wrong are covered in Michigan eviction notice laws. You are the landlord in the sublease relationship, so those rules are as likely to be yours to use as to be used against you.

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