Free Pennsylvania Sublease Agreement

Pennsylvania does not give tenants a right to sublet. What it gives is a one-sentence rule that decides most sublease arguments before they start: the sublessee is bound by the head lease.

Fill in the fields below and the generator produces a clean, dated PDF you can print, sign and hand to your subtenant. Nothing is stored and there is no charge. Fields you leave blank print as a dash so you can complete them by hand.

Watch: Pennsylvania Sublease Agreement explained

▶ Watch overview

It resolves the argument a sublessee would otherwise make — that they signed a sublease, not the head lease, and are bound only by what they agreed. In Pennsylvania they are subject to the head lease by statute. That protects the landlord, whose rules apply to whoever is in the unit; it protects the sublessor, whose subtenant cannot claim ignorance of terms; and it exposes an uninformed sublessee, who is bound by clauses nobody showed them. The fix is a copy of the lease, handed over before signing.

• The property address including unit or apartment number, and the county.
• The names of the tenant (as sublessee’s lessor) and the sublessee.
• The sublease term, ending on or before your own lease ends.
• The rent, the due date, and how it is paid.
• The deposit, who holds it, and the conditions for its return.
• Which utilities and services the sublessee pays.
• An express statement that under § 105 the sublessee is subject to the head lease.
• An acknowledgment that the sublessee has received a copy of that lease.
• A reference to the landlord’s written permission and its date.
• Signatures and dates from both parties.

• Searching Title 68 of the consolidated statutes. That is 68 Pa.C.S., Real and Personal Property; the Condominium Act is one subpart of it. Pennsylvania’s landlord-tenant law is the unconsolidated Act of 1951, 68 P.S. § 250.101 et seq.
• Not giving the sublessee the head lease. § 105 subjects them to its provisions whether or not they have read it.
• Stating § 203’s writing requirement as a general rule. It applies to a lease made or created for a term of more than three years.
• Assuming the notice period is fixed. § 501 sets 15 days for a term of one year or less or an indeterminate time and 30 days above — but § 501(e) lets the lease shorten or waive it entirely, and Pennsylvania leases routinely do. Read the clause before you count.
• Assuming an oral lease is no lease. § 201 allows real property to be leased for a term of not more than three years by oral contract or agreement.

Your lease decides. The Landlord and Tenant Act of 1951 does not give tenants a right to sublet, so a clause requiring the landlord’s written consent is effective and a clause prohibiting subletting is effective.

Pennsylvania is unusually easy to research incorrectly, and it is worth being explicit about why.

Most states put their landlord-tenant law in the consolidated statutes, so a search of “Title 68” would be the natural move. In Pennsylvania, Title 68 of the consolidated statutes — 68 Pa.C.S. — is titled Real and Personal Property. Its six subparts cover preliminary provisions, condominiums, cooperatives, planned communities, uses of property and public lands; the Uniform Condominium Act is § 3101 et seq., one subpart of the six. Searching the title for sublease law returns definitions from condominium and cooperative conversion provisions: “residential tenant”, “residential subtenant”, “conversion notice date”. None of it governs subletting an apartment.

Pennsylvania’s landlord-tenant law is the unconsolidated Landlord and Tenant Act of 1951 — the Act of April 6, 1951, P.L. 69, No. 20, cited as 68 P.S. § 250.101 et seq. It is a different body of law in a different place, and it is where the sublease provision lives.

Twenty words, and they settle the argument a sublessee would otherwise be entitled to make. A sublessee might reasonably say they signed a sublease and are bound by what they agreed to in it. In Pennsylvania, they are subject to the head lease by operation of this section.

Consider what is usually in a head lease: occupancy limits, guest rules, pet restrictions, parking allocations, quiet hours, restrictions on alterations, insurance requirements. Under § 105 all of it reaches your sublessee. Which makes handing over a copy of the lease a practical necessity rather than a nicety — they are bound by it either way, and the only question is whether they know what it says.

The 1951 Act keeps returning to a three-year line, and the effect is easy to state wrongly.

§ 201 allows real property to be leased for a term of not more than three years by a landlord or their agent, by oral or written contract. § 202 requires a lease for a term of more than three years to be in writing and signed, and provides that otherwise it has the force and effect of a lease at will only.

So the statutory writing requirement for an assignment attaches to longer leases. That is not a reason to do anything informally — a written, signed, dated document is what you will rely on in any dispute — but it is a reason not to tell people that Pennsylvania law requires every lease assignment to be in writing, because the section says something narrower.

Ground (2) is the one an unauthorized sublet engages: a forfeiture of the lease for breach of its conditions. The notice period then depends on the length of the lease — fifteen days for the ordinary one-year residential lease, thirty for anything longer. Ground (3), a failure on demand to satisfy rent reserved and due, carries its own ten-day notice under § 501(b).

This is the most important sentence on this page for anyone planning around a notice period. Pennsylvania residential leases very commonly contain a waiver of the notice to quit, and § 501(e) makes such a clause effective. So the fifteen or thirty days is the statutory default, not a floor you can count on.

It also closes a loop with § 105. The head lease binds your sublessee; if that same lease waives the notice to quit, the runway your sublessee is relying on may not exist. Check the clause, and tell them what you find.

If the matter proceeds, § 502 provides for a summons requiring the tenant to appear on a date not less than seven nor more than ten days from its date, and the summons may be served personally, by mail, or by posting it conspicuously on the leased premises. Posting is worth knowing about: a tenant who has moved out and left a sublessee behind may never see a notice affixed to a door they no longer use.

The structure of a sublease puts the person with the most to lose furthest from the information. Notices are addressed to the tenant named on the head lease. If that tenant has gone, notices may be posted at a property where only the sublessee lives, or mailed to someone who is not reading their post.

Fix it in the sublease. Agree that the tenant will forward any notice from the landlord immediately, give the landlord a current address, and give the sublessee a way to contact the landlord directly. None of that changes the legal position; all of it changes whether anyone finds out in time.

§ 204 lets a tenant mortgage their lease or term, and in doing so it defines “tenant” to include a subtenant holding under a sublease from a tenant under a prime lease, or from a subtenant under a sublease, provided the prime lease and any intervening subleases (or memoranda of them) have been recorded before the sublease to that subtenant. As applied to a mortgage made by a subtenant, the word “lease” in that section means the sublease.

This is not something most residential subtenants will ever use. It is included because it shows the Act treating a sublease as a real property interest capable of being dealt with, rather than as an informal side arrangement — which is the right way to think about the document you are about to sign.

Nothing in the Act moves your obligation onto your sublessee. You owe the rent, and the fact that your sublessee is bound by the head lease under § 105 does not make them liable to your landlord in your place. Price the sublease at no less than your own rent, collect it before your own due date, and hold a deposit that reflects the damage you would answer for.

A sublease leaves you in the middle and, under § 105, binds your sublessee to the head lease. An assignment transfers your whole remaining interest — and for a lease of more than three years, § 203 requires that to be in writing. Only a release from your landlord ends your own liability. A roommate joining you while you stay is an occupancy question, and since § 105 binds anyone who is a sublessee to the head lease, the occupancy clauses in that lease are the ones to read first.

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 Pennsylvania 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 Pennsylvania 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 Pennsylvania 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.

Published by Tenant Screening Background Check

Established 2004 · 20+ Years · All U.S. States & Territories · Statute-Based · Attorney-Reviewed

A Private Eye Reports™ service trusted by landlords, property managers, and attorneys.