Free Pennsylvania Lease Renewal Agreement

A lease renewal is an agreement to carry an existing tenancy into a further term. In Pennsylvania whether one is available is a matter of contract — the Landlord and Tenant Act of 1951 gives no tenant a right to renew, so the lease decides. What the Act supplies is the notice a landlord gives when repossessing, and it is worth reading because the end of a term is one of the three circumstances the section lists. It also supplies two limits that cut the other way: § 205 forbids nonrenewing a residential unit lease over participation in a tenants’ organization, and § 511.1(b) caps the deposit on any renewal of the original lease at one month’s rent.

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This document records that an existing tenancy is continuing, on what terms, and for how long. It amends the lease rather than replacing it, so every term the parties do not change carries forward. In Pennsylvania it matters mainly because the statutory backdrop is thin in one direction and specific in another. The Landlord and Tenant Act of 1951 tells you what a landlord does to repossess and how much notice that takes; it caps the deposit on a renewal at one month’s rent; and it forbids nonrenewing a residential lease over a tenants’ organization. It does not supply a renewal mechanism, a conversion rule for an expired fixed term, or a default term. Almost everything about the shape of a continuing tenancy comes from the document the parties sign.

• The parties, exactly as they are named on the lease being renewed.
• The property, including the unit number.
• Whether the property is a mobile home space — because § 501(a) excludes one from the notice mechanism entirely, and § 501(c) and (c.1) apply instead.
• The date the original lease was signed and the date its term ends.
• The length of the original term, since the § 501(b) notice period follows it.
• Whether the arrangement going forward is a fixed term or an indeterminate one.
• The new term – its start date, and its end date if it is a fixed term.
• The rent for the new term, and whether it has changed.
• Any notice already given, by whom, on what date it was served, and by which of the § 501(f) methods – personally on the tenant, by leaving it at the principal building upon the premises, or by posting it conspicuously on the leased premises. The § 501(b) periods run from that date, so the date and the method are the operative facts.
• What the lease says about notice, since § 501(e) lets a lease shorten or waive it.
• Every other term that is changing, and a statement that the rest continue unchanged.
• What happens to the deposit already held – and, if more is being asked for, that the total does not exceed the one month’s rent § 511.1(b) allows on a renewal of the original lease.

• Counting the notice backwards from the end of the term. Section 501(b) measures fifteen or thirty days from the date of service.
• Using the same period for every tenancy. The period follows the length of the lease — fifteen days for a year or less or an indeterminate time, thirty for longer — and § 501(c) replaces both for a mobile home park tenant.
• Treating the ten-day period as a general short notice. The § 501(b) ten days attaches to a failure, upon demand, to satisfy rent reserved and due — and § 501(d) sets a separate ten-day notice for termination due to the provisions of § 505-A. Two ten-day rules, two different triggers.
• Reading ‘no reason required’ as ‘any reason will do’. § 205 provides that no individual unit lease on residential property shall be terminated or nonrenewed on the basis of the participation of any tenant or member of the tenant’s family in a tenants’ organization or association. A non-renewal that follows tenant organizing is the case the Act names.
• Asking for a bigger deposit at renewal. § 511.1(b) provides that during the second and subsequent years of the lease, or during any renewal of the original lease, the amount required to be deposited may not exceed one month’s rent; § 511.1(d) adds that where a tenant has been in possession five years or more, a rent increase does not require a concomitant increase in the deposit; and § 511.1(f) voids any attempted waiver. A renewal document cannot contract around the cap.
• Citing the law as a consolidated code chapter. Pennsylvania’s landlord-tenant law is unconsolidated; the Landlord and Tenant Act of 1951 is what to name.
• Assuming the statutory periods cannot be changed. Section 501(e) lets the notice be for a lesser time, or be waived by the tenant, if the lease so provides — so the lease has to be read before the fifteen or thirty days is relied on.
• Applying § 501 to a mobile home space. Section 501(a) expressly excludes one in the middle of its opening sentence, and § 501(c.1) bars an owner recovering the space from a resident who is complying with the rules, paying the rent due and wishing to stay.

No. Nothing in the Landlord and Tenant Act of 1951 gives a Pennsylvania tenant a right to renew, and nothing in it renews a lease on its own. Whether a renewal is available depends on what the lease says. If the lease contains a renewal or extension clause, that clause governs. If it does not, a renewal happens when both sides agree one, and not before.

What the statute supplies is the other half of the picture: what a landlord does when the answer is no, how much notice that takes, what the deposit may be on the way through, and the one reason for a non-renewal the Act puts out of bounds.

A structural note first, because it causes more confusion than it should. Pennsylvania’s landlord-tenant law is unconsolidated. The operative text is the Landlord and Tenant Act of 1951, enacted and published by the General Assembly as an act rather than as a chapter of a consolidated code. Its own words are “The General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania hereby enacts as follows”, and § 101 provides that it “shall be known and may be cited as ‘The Landlord and Tenant Act of 1951.’”

The practical consequence is small but real: cite the Act. A reader who goes looking for a consolidated statutes chapter on landlord and tenant will have a frustrating afternoon. References of the form “68 P.S. § 250.501” point at the same text through an unofficial compilation, and are widely used — including by Pennsylvania courts — but the Act is the operative source.

Section 501(a) of the Act provides:

“A landlord desirous of repossessing real property from a tenant except real property which is a mobile home space as defined in the act of November 24, 1976 (P.L.1176, No.261), known as the ‘Mobile Home Park Rights Act,’ may notify, in writing, the tenant to remove from the same at the expiration of the time specified in the notice under the following circumstances, namely,”

• “(1) Upon the termination of a term of the tenant”;
• “(2) or upon forfeiture of the lease for breach of its conditions”;
• “(3) or upon the failure of the tenant, upon demand, to satisfy any rent reserved and due”.

Two features of that sentence do the work. The first is the carve-out sitting in the middle of it: the subsection applies to a landlord repossessing real property from a tenant except real property which is a mobile home space. That is not a footnote at the end; it is a condition on the whole mechanism, and it is quoted here in place rather than elided, because a version of this sentence without it describes a rule that does not exist for a mobile home park resident.

The second is that the end of a term sits in the list alongside breach and non-payment as one of three circumstances in which the statutory notice is given. The statute presents them as an undifferentiated enumeration, introduced by “namely” and joined by “or”, so nothing turns on which is printed first and no ordering should be read into them. What matters is that the expiry of a term is on the list at all: Pennsylvania does not, as a general matter, frame non-renewal as an exceptional step requiring justification.

For a tenant that is worth knowing plainly, because it sets expectations correctly. The end of a term is a real end here, and a tenant who wants to continue should be raising it rather than waiting to see whether a reason is offered.

The general answer is no — and the general answer is not the whole answer. The Act contains no just-cause scheme, no list of permitted reasons for declining a renewal, and no requirement that a reason be stated in the notice. The words “just cause”, “good cause” and “justification” do not appear in it.

It does, however, contain one provision that names non-renewal expressly and forbids it. Section 205, Participation in Tenants’ Association, added by the Act of December 18, 1984, P.L.1003, No.203, provides in full:

“No individual unit lease on residential property shall be terminated or nonrenewed on the basis of the participation of any tenant or member of the tenant’s family in a tenants’ organization or association.”

Four things about it are worth stating precisely.

It is residential-only: it reaches an individual unit lease on residential property. It reaches non-renewal by name, not merely termination — which is unusual, and which is why it belongs on a renewal page rather than an eviction one. It extends beyond the tenant to a member of the tenant’s family. And the protected activity is defined: § 102 provides that “‘Tenants’ organization or association’ means a group of tenants organized for any purpose directly related to their rights or duties as tenants.”

So the accurate statement is that no general justification is required, not that any reason will do. A landlord who declines to renew for no stated reason is doing an ordinary thing under § 501. A landlord who declines to renew because the tenant, or the tenant’s family member, took part in a tenants’ organization is doing the thing § 205 prohibits. Every summary on this page — the hero, the lead, the key callout, the dashboard, the takeaway and the FAQ — carries that qualifier, because a summary that carries only the general rule is the half of the sentence that gets someone into trouble.

Section 501(b) sets the length of the notice, and it does so by reference to the length of the lease rather than to the type of tenancy. Its text, in full:

“Except as provided for in subsection (c), in case of the expiration of a term or of a forfeiture for breach of the conditions of the lease where the lease is for any term of one year or less or for an indeterminate time, the notice shall specify that the tenant shall remove within fifteen days from the date of service thereof, and when the lease is for more than one year, then within thirty days from the date of service thereof. In case of failure of the tenant, upon demand, to satisfy any rent reserved and due, the notice shall specify that the tenant shall remove within ten days from the date of the service thereof.”

Four qualifiers sit around that ladder and each of them matters.

The first is the measuring point. These periods run from the date of service thereof — the notice tells the tenant to remove within fifteen or thirty days of being served. That is a different mechanism from a rule requiring notice a fixed period before a term expires, where the deadline is set by the tenancy’s own calendar. Here, service starts the clock. Section 501(f) sets out how service is made: the notice “may be served personally on the tenant, or by leaving the same at the principal building upon the premises, or by posting the same conspicuously on the leased premises.” Because the period runs from that act, the date and the method of service are the two facts a renewal document should record.

The second is the opening words. Subsection (b) begins “Except as provided for in subsection (c)”, and applies to the expiration of a term or a forfeiture for breach of the conditions of the lease. It is not a general-purpose notice rule; it is a rule for those situations, subject to a carve-out.

The third is § 501(c), the carve-out itself. For a tenant of a mobile home park, on expiration of a term or a forfeiture for breach, the notice specifies removal within thirty days where the lease is for less than one year or for an indeterminate time, and within three months where it is for one year or more. And subsection (c) has a second sentence, which is a rule of its own and easy to miss:

“In case of failure of the tenant, upon demand, to satisfy any rent reserved and due, the notice, if given on or after April first and before September first, shall specify that the tenant shall remove within fifteen days from the date of the service thereof, and if given on or after September first and before April first, then within thirty days from the date of the service thereof.”

That is a seasonal rule, and it runs the opposite way to intuition: the longer period applies in the colder half of the year. It applies only to a mobile home park tenant and only to rent unsatisfied on demand, but within that box it displaces the ten days subsection (b) would otherwise give.

The fourth is that ten days is not one rule but two. The subsection (b) ten days attaches to a failure, upon demand, to satisfy any rent reserved and due. Section 501(d) provides separately: “In case of termination due to the provisions of section 505-A, the notice shall specify that the tenant shall remove within ten days from the date of service thereof.” Section 505-A is the illegal-drugs section, which makes certain drug-related acts a breach of condition of the lease and grounds for removal. So a ten-day notice on a Pennsylvania tenancy may be a rent notice or a § 505-A notice, and the two are not interchangeable. Neither is a renewal timetable.

One further limit, added recently: § 501(g), added by the Act of July 17, 2024, P.L.944, No.88, provides that the section “shall not apply to a landlord desirous of repossessing real property from a person who is not, nor ever has been, a tenant of the real property.”

Two provisions take mobile home park residents out of the picture drawn above, and they cut in the opposite direction from the rest of this page.

Section 501(a) excludes, from the middle of its opening sentence, “real property which is a mobile home space as defined in the act of November 24, 1976 (P.L.1176, No.261), known as the ‘Mobile Home Park Rights Act,’”. So the notice mechanism described here is not the one that applies. Section 102 defines the terms: a “mobile home space” is “a plot of ground within a mobile home park designed for the accommodation of one mobile home”, and a “mobile home resident” is “an owner of a mobile home who leases or rents space in a mobile home park” — a definition that expressly “does not include a person who rents or leases a mobile home”. The distinction is between renting the ground and renting the home.

And § 501(c.1) goes considerably further: “The owner of a mobile home park shall not be entitled to recovery of the mobile home space upon the termination of a lease with a resident regardless of the term of the lease if the resident: (1) is complying with the rules of the mobile home park; and (2) is paying the rent due; and (3) desires to continue living in the mobile home park.”

Section 501(c.2) then closes the list from the other side: the only basis for recovery of a mobile home space by a park owner is legal eviction under section 3 of the Mobile Home Park Rights Act, a written mutual agreement to terminate, or the expiration of a lease where the resident has decided he no longer wishes to reside in the park and has said so in writing.

That is the inverse of the general position this page describes for other tenancies. For a compliant, paying resident who wishes to stay, the end of the term is not a route to possession at all.

Pennsylvania residential leases very commonly contain a clause shortening or waiving the § 501 notice, and it is one of the most frequently asked questions in this area. The Act answers it directly, three subsections below the text quoted above.

Section 501(e): “The notice above provided for may be for a lesser time or may be waived by the tenant if the lease so provides.”

So a Pennsylvania lease may shorten the fifteen- or thirty-day period, or dispense with the notice altogether, where the lease so provides. That makes reading the lease’s own notice clause the first step rather than the last: the statutory periods are defaults, and a signed lease can displace them.

Two limits on how far that takes you. The subsection speaks of a waiver by the tenant “if the lease so provides”, so it is the lease term that matters, not a landlord’s later assertion. And whether a particular clause is effective in a particular case can turn on case law, which sits outside the statutory text this page reads. What is settled, and settled by the statute itself, is that the Act permits the thing — there is no general rule against it to fall back on.

It is worth contrasting § 501(e) with the way the Act treats waiver elsewhere, because the Act is not uniformly permissive. It uses the word “waive” and its cognates seven times, and the seven do different jobs: some, like § 501(e), permit a tenant to give up a protection by contract; others do the reverse and provide that an attempted waiver is void and unenforceable. The escrow sections are in the second group. So “the lease can change it” is a correct statement about the § 501 notice and an incorrect one about the deposit, and the two must not be run together.

This is a renewal-specific rule, and the Act names the renewal case in terms. Section 511.1, Escrow Funds Limited, added by the Act of December 29, 1972, P.L.1698, No.363, works as a ladder:

• (a) “No landlord may require a sum in excess of two months’ rent to be deposited in escrow for the payment of damages to the leasehold premises and/or default in rent thereof during the first year of any lease.”
• (b) “During the second and subsequent years of the lease or during any renewal of the original lease the amount required to be deposited may not exceed one month’s rent.”
• (c) where, during the third or subsequent year of a lease, or during any renewal after the expiration of two years of tenancy, the landlord requires the one month’s rent escrow, the funds together with interest are returned on termination or on surrender and acceptance in accordance with §§ 511.2 and 512.
• (d) “Whenever a tenant has been in possession of premises for a period of five years or greater, any increase or increases in rent shall not require a concomitant increase in any security deposit.”
• (e) “This section applies only to the rental of residential property.”
• (f) “Any attempted waiver of this section by a tenant by contract or otherwise shall be void and unenforceable.”

Read together, those subsections answer a question renewals raise constantly. A landlord raising the rent at renewal often wants to raise the deposit to match. Subsection (b) is the ceiling on that: on any renewal of the original lease, the deposit may not exceed one month’s rent — which is lower than the two months’ rent permitted in the first year, not higher. A renewal is, on the deposit question, a step down rather than a step up.

Subsection (d) adds a second limit for the long-tenured: once a tenant has been in possession five years or more, a rent increase does not carry a deposit increase with it. And subsection (f) removes the usual escape route — unlike the § 501 notice, this is not something a lease or a renewal document can contract around. An attempted waiver by the tenant, “by contract or otherwise”, is void.

Section 512 then governs what happens to the money at the end: a written list of claimed damages within thirty days of termination or of surrender and acceptance, whichever first occurs, delivered with payment of the difference; a landlord who fails to provide the list within thirty days forfeits the right to withhold; and § 512(d) makes any attempted waiver of that section void as well. Section 512(f) confines it to residential leaseholds.

The practical upshot for a renewal document is a single line: state what deposit is being carried forward, and if any further sum is being asked for, check the total against the one month’s rent § 511.1(b) allows before it is written down.

Here is the honest shape of it. The Act contains no rule converting an expired fixed term into a periodic tenancy. That is a statement about the captured text, re-checked at the moment of writing: the phrases “month to month”, “month-to-month”, “holdover” and “hold over” appear in the Act zero times. Whatever a Pennsylvania tenancy becomes when a term runs out and both sides carry on as before, the Landlord and Tenant Act of 1951 does not say it in those words, and this page prints no conversion rule because there is none to print.

Two provisions in the Act bear on the situation without resolving it, and both are worth knowing.

The first is § 202, which is about how leases are made rather than how they end, but which contains the Act’s only conversion-shaped sentence. A lease for a term of more than three years must be in writing; an unwritten one “shall have the force and effect of a lease at will only” — “unless the tenancy has continued for more than one year and the landlord and tenant have recognized its rightful existence by claiming and admitting liability for the rent, in which case the tenancy shall become one from year to year.” That is a rule about an unwritten long lease, not about a fixed term that has run out, and it should not be borrowed for the second situation. It is set out here so that a reader who finds the phrase “from year to year” in the Act knows exactly which provision it belongs to.

The second is the definition of “Tenant” in § 102, added by the Act of July 17, 2024, P.L.944, No.88: “a person who occupies the land or premises of another in subordination to the other’s title and with the other’s express or implied consent, including, but not limited to, oral or written leases or acceptance of rent by an owner or their agent.” Someone who stays on after a term ends and whose rent is accepted is, on that definition, a tenant. What the Act does not say is what the term of that tenancy is — and the notice ladder in § 501(b) turns on exactly that, since it asks whether the lease is for one year or less, for more than one year, or for an indeterminate time.

Nor is a renewal required to be written. Section 201 permits real property to be leased “for a term of not more than three years” by oral or written contract or agreement. An oral renewal of a short tenancy is therefore possible in Pennsylvania — which is precisely why an unwritten one is a bad idea, since the length of the term is the fact the notice period depends on and the fact nobody can later prove.

Which is, in a practical sense, the argument for the document. Where the statute does not tell the parties what a continuing tenancy looks like, the parties have to. A signed renewal naming the term, the rent, the deposit and the notice each side owes replaces a set of open questions with a set of answered ones.

The Landlord and Tenant Act of 1951 sets no notice period for a rent increase and no cap on one. Its only mention of a rent increase at all is § 511.1(d), and that provision is about the deposit rather than the rent: where a tenant has been in possession for five years or more, “any increase or increases in rent shall not require a concomitant increase in any security deposit”.

So the rent for a renewal term is, under this Act, a matter for the lease and for the parties’ agreement, with the one deposit consequence just described. Municipal ordinances sit outside this page’s scope — Philadelphia and Pittsburgh each maintain their own landlord-tenant requirements — and a lease or a housing programme may impose notice obligations the Act does not.

The Pennsylvania material behind this page is the text of the Landlord and Tenant Act of 1951 as published by the Pennsylvania General Assembly. It is the statute, and only the statute. No case law was read; a statute is what the legislature enacted, and a court’s application of it can be narrower or broader than the words suggest.

An earlier version of this page said the waiver question was unresolved, on the basis of a whole-Act search that reported no waiver provision for § 501. That search was wrong: the Act contains seven occurrences of “waive” and its cognates, one of which is § 501(e) itself. The page now states what the subsection says. The correction is recorded here rather than quietly applied, because a search returning nothing looks exactly like a search finding nothing, and the difference is the whole value of the note.

A later version then told the reader that whether a landlord needs a reason to decline a renewal had not been looked into. That was wrong in the same way, and worse, because it pointed the reader away from a provision that had been sitting in the same captured text throughout. Section 205 is in the Act in full, it names non-renewal expressly, and it is now stated on every surface of this page. A page that says a question is open tells its reader to stop looking; that is why both corrections are printed rather than absorbed.

Two questions remain genuinely outside what a statute can settle. Whether a particular automatic-renewal clause binds a particular tenant, and whether a particular waiver clause is effective, are questions of contract interpretation on which the Act is silent and on which case law does the work. Check the current text of the Act and your local rules before acting.

The sequence above covers the five steps that matter most. These follow from the same provisions and are worth doing in the same sitting.

• Check the deposit against section 511.1(b) before asking for more. Section 511.1(a) caps the escrow deposit at two months’ rent during the first year of any lease. Section 511.1(b) then provides that during the second and subsequent years of the lease, or during any renewal of the original lease, the amount required to be deposited may not exceed one month’s rent. Section 511.1(f) makes any attempted waiver of that section by a tenant, by contract or otherwise, void and unenforceable, so a renewal document cannot contract around it.
• Check whether a reason is being given, and what the reason is. Section 205 provides that no individual unit lease on residential property shall be terminated or nonrenewed on the basis of the participation of any tenant or member of the tenant’s family in a tenants’ organization or association. Section 102 defines that term as a group of tenants organized for any purpose directly related to their rights or duties as tenants. A non-renewal that follows tenant organizing is the one the Act names.
• Check whether a mobile home space is involved before relying on any of this. Section 501(a) excludes real property which is a mobile home space from the whole notice-to-quit mechanism, and section 501(c.1) provides that the owner of a mobile home park is not entitled to recovery of the space on termination of a lease, regardless of the term, from a resident who is complying with the rules, is paying the rent due and desires to continue living in the park. For that resident the end of a term is not a route to possession at all.

A renewal is mostly a matter of contract, so what it can do is decided by the existing lease before it is decided by statute. The place state law bites hardest is the rent, because continuing a tenancy is when it usually changes. Our guide to Pennsylvania rent increase laws sets out the notice that has to come first, which is often the real deadline in that negotiation.

The second place is what happens when the parties do not agree. An expiring term does not resolve itself, and Pennsylvania eviction notice laws explain the notices and timelines that follow if a tenant stays on without a new agreement.

For the obligations that run between a landlord and a tenant throughout the tenancy, and the rules that apply to both sides, see Pennsylvania landlord tenant laws.

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