Free Alabama Sublease Agreement

Alabama does not tell you whether you may sublet — your lease does. What Alabama tells you is which chapter governs everything that happens next, and for a home the answer is the URLTA, to the exclusion of the older law most summaries quote.

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Watch: Alabama Sublease Agreement explained

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Swept across all 48 sections of chapter 35-9A, the words sublet, sublease and sublessee do not appear. But § 35-9A-141(7) does use “sublessor”, in the definition of “landlord” — and that single word is the most consequential thing the chapter says about subletting. It means the Act does not ignore a sublease; it treats the sublessor as a landlord and applies the whole chapter to them. So the right conclusion is not “Alabama has no sublease law” but “Alabama has no sublease consent rule, and its full residential code governs the relationship you create.”

• The property address including unit number, and the county.
• The names of the tenant (as sublessor) and the subtenant.
• The sublease term, ending on or before your own lease ends.
• The rent, the due date, and how it is paid.
• The deposit — capped at one month’s rent under § 35-9A-201(a) — and the 60-day itemised-notice deadline for returning it.
• Which utilities and services the subtenant pays.
• A reference to the landlord’s written permission and its date.
• An acknowledgment that the subtenant has received the head lease.
• A note that the sublessor is a landlord under § 35-9A-141(7).
• Signatures and dates from both parties.

• Applying chapter 35-9 to a home. § 35-9A-121 makes the URLTA the exclusive remedy for a dwelling unit. The ten-day notice to quit, the ten-day month-to-month notice and the December-1 default term are all chapter 35-9 rules, displaced for residential tenancies.
• Relying on the landlord’s lien over a subtenant’s belongings. § 35-9A-425 makes a lien on the tenant’s household goods unenforceable unless perfected before January 1, 2007, and abolishes distraint for rent outright.
• Taking more than one month’s rent as a deposit. § 35-9A-201(a) caps it, with narrow exceptions for pets, alterations and increased liability risks.
• Missing the 60 days. § 35-9A-201(b) requires the itemised written notice and the amount due within 60 days of termination and delivery of possession — and as sublessor, that duty is yours.
• Changing the locks or cutting the power. § 35-9A-427 bars it; § 35-9A-407 lets the tenant recover possession or terminate and take up to three months’ rent or actual damages, whichever is greater, plus attorney’s fees.
• Citing §§ 35-9-30 to 35-9-42. Those are the crop-lien division — levy on a subtenant’s crop, subrogation, attachment against the tenant in chief. Full of the word “subtenant”, and nothing to do with an apartment.

Your lease decides. Neither of Alabama’s two landlord-tenant chapters grants a tenant the right to sublet or requires the landlord’s consent, so a clause requiring written permission is effective and a clause prohibiting subletting is effective.

The harder question — and the one most Alabama summaries get wrong — is which chapter governs what happens next.

Chapter 35-9 is the old general landlord-and-tenant chapter, dating in parts to the 1923 and 1940 codes. Chapter 35-9A is the Alabama Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act, enacted by Act 2006-316. Both are on the books, and a search engine will happily hand you the older one.

“Exclusive remedy” is doing the work. If the premises are a dwelling unit, chapter 35-9A is the regime, and the chapter 35-9 rules that circulate as Alabama law — a ten-day notice to quit, a ten-day month-to-month notice, a tenancy running December to December, a landlord’s lien over goods — are not the answer for your apartment. They remain real law for commercial and farm tenancies.

The words sublet, sublease and sublessee appear nowhere in the chapter’s 48 sections. Sublessor appears once, here — and it is the most important thing the URLTA says about subletting. It means the Act does not overlook a sublease. It treats the person who sublets as a landlord and applies the whole residential code to them.

So when you sublet an Alabama apartment you hold two positions at once: tenant as against your own landlord, landlord as against your subtenant. The deposit rules, the notice periods, the access rules and the bar on self-help all now run from you as well as to you.

Three things differ from the ten-day rule usually quoted. The period is seven business days, not ten calendar days, so weekends and holidays push the real date out. It runs from receipt, not from the date on the paper. And it is curable — remedying the breach before the specified date stops the termination, except for an intentional misrepresentation of a material fact, which the section says may not be cured.

Subsection (b) applies the same seven-business-day, curable structure to unpaid rent, and requires the notice to specify the amount of rent and any late fees owed.

§ 35-9A-441 sets the periodic-tenancy notice periods: seven days to end a week-to-week tenancy, and at least 30 days before the periodic rental date to end a month-to-month tenancy. Subsection (c) deals with the holdover: the landlord may bring an action for possession, and where the holdover is willful and not in good faith may also recover up to three months’ periodic rent or actual damages, whichever is greater, plus reasonable attorney’s fees.

A sublessor whose subtenant will not leave is the landlord in that sentence. Thirty days’ written notice, then an action — not a shorter notice borrowed from chapter 35-9.

Because you are a landlord to your subtenant, this is a rule about your conduct. Changing the locks, removing a door, or cutting the power on someone who will not leave is the single most expensive mistake available to an Alabama sublessor.

§ 35-9A-201(a) bars a landlord from demanding or receiving security in excess of one month’s periodic rent, except for pets, changes to the premises, or increased liability risks. Subsection (b) allows the deposit to be applied to accrued rent and to damage from the tenant’s noncompliance with § 35-9A-301, all as itemized in a written notice delivered to the tenant together with the amount due, 60 days after termination of the tenancy and delivery of possession.

Take a deposit from your subtenant and both halves are yours to observe: the cap when you take it, and the itemised notice within sixty days when the sublease ends.

Older material — and an earlier version of this page — leans on § 35-9-11, which extends a landlord’s lien to a sublessee, and on § 35-9-60, the lien of “the landlord of any storehouse or other building” over the goods of a tenant and subtenant. For a residential tenancy that exposure has been removed.

So a subtenant in an Alabama apartment does not need to plan around a landlord’s lien over their belongings, and a sublessor should not tell them otherwise. What a landlord has instead is the ordinary route: notice under § 35-9A-421, and an action for possession.

§ 35-9A-303 asks the tenant not to unreasonably withhold consent to entry for inspection, repairs, agreed services, or showing the unit — and limits entry without consent to an emergency, a court order, the abandonment provisions, and showings on prior notice. § 35-9A-501 bars retaliation by discriminatory rent increases, reduced services, or bringing or threatening an action for possession because the tenant complained to a housing-code authority, complained to the landlord, or joined a tenants’ organisation.

Both run from sublessor to subtenant as well.

A search of chapter 35-9 for “subtenant” returns a run of sections from § 35-9-30 onward — the crop-lien division. § 35-9-30 declares a lien on the crop grown on rented land; § 35-9-31 sets rent due on November 1 of the year the crop is grown; § 35-9-39 covers levy upon the crop of a subtenant; §§ 35-9-40 to -42 deal with subrogation and attachment against the tenant in chief.

They are genuine law, they are full of the word “subtenant”, and they are about farms. Anyone quoting them at you in a residential context has searched for a word rather than read a chapter.

Subletting does not transfer your obligation to your landlord. You owe the rent whether or not your subtenant pays you, and you answer for the state of the premises. Set the sublease rent at no less than your own, collect before your own due date, and hold a deposit that matches the exposure rather than a round number.

A sublease is for a temporary departure with an intended return, and § 35-9-11 describes your subtenant’s position. An assignment transfers your whole remaining interest, and § 35-9-10 describes the assignee’s. Only a release from your landlord ends your own liability, and that is a separate agreement from either. A roommate moving in while you stay is an occupancy question, and your lease will usually deal with occupancy separately.

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 Alabama 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 Alabama 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 Alabama 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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