Free Virginia Lease Extension Agreement

A lease extension is an agreement to carry an existing tenancy into a further term. It continues the existing lease rather than replacing it with a new one — that is the usual distinction between an extension and a renewal — though leases and statutes often use the two words for the same thing, so what governs is what the document in front of you actually says. Whether one happens at all depends on the lease — neither an extension nor a renewal is automatic. What Virginia adds is a provision written for that moment: not for termination generally, but for the rent in the subsequent term and for non-renewal. It is bounded on three sides — by the landlord’s holdings, by the kind of tenant it protects, and by a carve-out for periodic tenancies created under § 55.1-1253(C). Alongside it sit the ordinary periodic notice periods, a rule for the tenant who simply stays on, and a detailed holdover provision.

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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 Virginia it also fixes the facts that decide whether § 55.1-1204(K) applied: whether the tenant had a renewal option or an automatic-renewal provision, whether the tenancy was a periodic one created under § 55.1-1253(C), what the rent was and what it is becoming, and when notice was given. Those are simple facts at the time and awkward ones to reconstruct afterwards.

• The parties, exactly as they are named on the lease being renewed.
• The property, including the unit number.
• The date the original lease was signed and the date its term ends.
• Whether the lease gives a renewal option or contains an automatic-renewal provision – the fact the rent-increase limb of § 55.1-1204(K) turns on.
• Whether the tenancy is a periodic tenancy created under § 55.1-1253(C), which subsection (K) does not reach.
• Whether the landlord owns more than four rental dwelling units in the Commonwealth, or more than a 10 per cent interest in more than four.
• The date the landlord’s written notice was given, if one was required, and whether it was a rent-increase notice or a non-renewal notice.
• 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.
• Every other term that is changing, and a statement that the rest continue unchanged.
• What happens to the deposit already held.

• Applying § 55.1-1204(K) to every landlord. It reaches landlords owning more than four rental dwelling units, or more than a 10 per cent interest in more than four.
• Counting only units held personally. The subsection counts holdings “whether individually or through a business entity”.
• Carrying the renewal-option limit across into the non-renewal sentence. In the version in force until 1 July 2027, the rent-increase notice is owed to a tenant with a renewal option or an automatic-renewal provision, but the next sentence requires written notice of nonrenewal “to any tenant” and does not repeat the limit.
• Forgetting the carve-out. Subsection (K) does not apply to a periodic tenancy created pursuant to § 55.1-1253(C). Where it does not apply, § 55.1-1253(D) does.
• Attaching the lease-may-vary rider to the wrong periodic limb. In § 55.1-1253(A) the words “unless the rental agreement provides for a different notice period” sit in the month-to-month sentence. The week-to-week sentence ends at the next rent due date.
• Reading 150 per cent as the only limit on a daily holdover charge. § 55.1-1253(C) requires the liquidated damage penalty to be reasonable as well as capped, and for a public housing unit or a unit subject to HUD regulation the ceiling is the per diem of the monthly rent set out in the lease agreement — 100 per cent, not 150.
• Treating a holdover as automatically indefensible. Section 55.1-1253(C) allows the tenant to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that the failure to vacate was reasonable.
• Working to the wrong version of subsection (K). The rent-increase figure changes from 60 to 90 days on 1 July 2027, and the notice acquires required content it does not have today.

Only if the lease says so. Renewal is not automatic in Virginia: it depends on the lease, or on a fresh agreement between the parties. What the Code does is recognise the possibility. Va. Code § 55.1-1204(A) expressly contemplates automatic renewal of the rental agreement as a permitted lease term, so an automatic-renewal clause is not an oddity here — it is a recognised feature that the statute builds around.

And having recognised it, Virginia writes a notice obligation aimed squarely at the tenants such clauses affect. That obligation is the most distinctive thing on this page, and almost everything that goes wrong with it goes wrong by stating it without its limits.

The subsection, in the version effective until 1 July 2027, reads: “A landlord who owns more than four rental dwelling units or more than a 10 percent interest in more than four rental dwelling units, whether individually or through a business entity, in the Commonwealth shall provide written notice to any tenant who has the option to renew a rental agreement or whose rental agreement contains an automatic renewal provision of any increase in rent during the subsequent rental agreement term. Such landlord shall also provide written notice of nonrenewal to any tenant. Such notices shall be provided to the tenant no less than 60 days prior to the end of the rental agreement term. This subsection shall not apply to any periodic tenancy created pursuant to subsection C of § 55.1-1253.”

Three qualifiers have to travel with that or it describes a different rule from the one enacted. They are on the dashboard, in the hero, in the page description and in the summary at the foot of this page as well as here, because a reader who meets only one of those surfaces should still meet the rule as written.

The threshold is about the landlord, not the building. More than four rental dwelling units in the Commonwealth — or more than a ten per cent interest in more than four — and expressly counting holdings through a business entity. A landlord with two duplexes and a share in a partnership that owns several more may well be inside it; the arithmetic is not simply “how many doors do I manage”.

The rent-increase notice is written for a particular kind of tenant. It is owed to a tenant who has the option to renew, or whose rental agreement contains an automatic-renewal provision. That is a deliberate targeting: those are the tenants for whom a rent figure for a term they may roll into without signing anything is most consequential.

There is a carve-out. The subsection does not apply to a periodic tenancy created pursuant to § 55.1-1253(C).

The renewal-option / automatic-renewal qualifier attaches grammatically to the rent-increase sentence. The sentence that follows it — “Such landlord shall also provide written notice of nonrenewal to any tenant” — is written more broadly and does not repeat the limit, so it should not be assumed to carry it. On the face of the current text, the non-renewal duty is the wider of the two.

What happens to that point on 1 July 2027 is an open question, and this page does not pretend otherwise. The amended text described in the next section rewrites the sentence as: “If the landlord is not renewing the tenant’s rental agreement, he shall provide written notice of nonrenewal to the tenant no less than 60 days prior to the end of the rental agreement term.” The express words any tenant are gone, which is the fact everything here starts from. What that does to the duty’s reach is the part that is arguable.

On the narrower reading, the tenant is a definite article and it reads back to the tenant described in the sentences before it — the one with a renewal option or an automatic-renewal provision. The Assembly removed a word meaning “anyone” and put in its place a word that points at someone already identified; on that reading the breadth of the non-renewal limb is a feature of the version in force now, and a reader working after 1 July 2027 should not carry it forward.

On the broader reading, the rewritten sentence is not a continuation at all but a self-contained conditional with a trigger of its own: if the landlord is not renewing the tenant’s rental agreement. That condition is capable of being met by any tenant of a landlord inside the more-than-four-unit threshold, and on that reading “the tenant” means no more than the tenant whose agreement is not being renewed — the amendment tidying the sentence’s form rather than cutting its reach. It is also hard to see what mischief a narrowing would address, since the notice’s purpose is to give a tenant losing their home time to plan.

Nothing read for this page resolves that. No Virginia case, opinion or legislative note on the point was found, and none is cited above because none was read. The honest position is that the current text is broad on its face, that the 2027 text is ambiguous, and that a party planning around either reading after that date is taking a position rather than following a settled rule. A landlord who simply gives the non-renewal notice to every tenant avoids the question entirely, which is the practical answer for most readers.

Within those limits the subsection does two useful things at once. It requires notice of any increase in rent during the subsequent rental agreement term — so a tenant with an automatic-renewal clause should not discover the new figure after the new term has begun — and it requires written notice of nonrenewal, which is the rarer of the two obligations and the one that gives a tenant time to plan.

The capture for this page holds two versions of § 55.1-1204, served together: the text quoted above, marked “Effective until July 1, 2027”, and a second full text marked “Effective July 1, 2027”. The substantive change is in (K), and subsections (A) to (J) are the same in substance — but not, on the bytes, character-for-character identical, and on a page whose whole method is to quote provisions as enacted that is worth saying rather than glossing. Comparing the two texts through (J) turns up exactly one difference, of a single letter: in subsection (C)(1) the current version reads “The provision of this chapter shall be applicable to the dwelling unit that is being rented”, and the 2027 version reads “The provisions of this chapter…”. Nothing on this page turns on it, and it looks like the correction of a typographical singular; it is recorded because an absolute claim of identity would not have survived the comparison. Beyond that, the historical citation is what identifies the amendment: the current version ends “2026, cc. 722, 723”, the 2027 version ends “2026, cc. 722, 723, 1066”. Chapter 1066 is the change. Because a page like this one outlives a legislative session, that is worth stating rather than leaving to be discovered.

From 1 July 2027, the landlord “shall provide the tenant with this written notice of rent increase at least 90 days prior to the end of the rental agreement term”, and that notice “shall include a deadline by which the tenant shall advise the landlord of whether the tenant will renew the rental agreement”, which “shall be no sooner than 30 days after the written notice of rent increase is delivered to the tenant”.

The nonrenewal notice stays at not less than 60 days. So from that date the two obligations in subsection (K) run on different clocks: 90 days for a rent increase, 60 for a non-renewal — and the rent-increase notice acquires a required piece of content it does not have today, together with a tenant-response deadline that cannot fall sooner than thirty days after delivery. The carve-out for a § 55.1-1253(C) periodic tenancy is unchanged in both versions. If you are reading this on or after 1 July 2027, work to that version, and remember that it is also the version in which the non-renewal sentence reads “to the tenant”.

Subsection (K) does not apply to a periodic tenancy created under § 55.1-1253(C), which leaves a gap the form on this page can easily produce — the tenant stays on, month to month, with nothing new signed. § 55.1-1253(D) is the provision that governs it.

Where a rental agreement terminates and the tenant remains in possession with the agreement of the landlord, either as a hold-over tenant or a month-to-month tenant, and no new rental agreement is entered into, the terms of the terminated agreement remain in effect and govern the hold-over or month-to-month tenancy. The rent is either the amount provided in the terminated agreement or the amount set out in a written notice to the tenant — and a new rent amount “shall not take effect until the next rent due date coming 30 days after the notice”.

That is the rule to work to if the answer at the end of the term is “carry on as we are”. The old terms survive, and a rent change needs its own written notice with thirty days running to the next rent due date — not to the date of service.

§ 55.1-1253(A) sets the ordinary periodic periods, and it sets them in two separate sentences that do not carry the same rider.

A week-to-week tenancy is terminated by serving a written notice on the other party at least seven days prior to the next rent due date. That sentence ends there.

A month-to-month tenancy is terminated by serving a written notice on the other party at least 30 days prior to the next rent due date, “unless the rental agreement provides for a different notice period”. Either party may give the notice in both cases.

That closing clause is worth pausing on, and worth keeping where the statute put it. For a month-to-month tenancy the statutory period is a default the rental agreement can displace, so the lease has to be read before the period is assumed — a tenant working from “thirty days” when the agreement says sixty has misjudged their own obligation. The seven-day week-to-week period carries no such words in subsection (A).

The measuring point is also specific in both limbs: the notice runs to the next rent due date, not to thirty or seven days from service.

§ 55.1-1253(B) adds a provision for larger properties. Any owner of a multifamily premises that fails to renew the greater of either 20 or more month-to-month tenancies or 50 percent of the month-to-month tenancies within a consecutive 30-day period in the same multifamily premises shall serve written notice on each such tenant at least 60 days prior to allowing such tenancy to expire.

The exception is stated with a measure attached: sixty days’ notice is not required to allow a tenancy to expire where the tenant has failed to pay rent in accordance with the rental agreement. It is the agreement that fixes what counts as failing to pay, so those words belong in any statement of the exception.

The subsection is aimed at a specific event — a building clearing out a large share of its month-to-month tenants at once — and the threshold is a comparison rather than a flat number: whichever is greater of twenty tenancies or half of them.

If neither side acts, the outcome depends on whether the landlord agrees to the tenant staying. Where the tenant remains with the landlord’s agreement and nothing new is signed, § 55.1-1253(D) above carries the old terms forward into a hold-over or month-to-month tenancy. Where the tenant remains without the landlord’s consent, the tenancy has ended and § 55.1-1253(C) applies instead.

That subsection gives the landlord possession together with actual damages, reasonable attorney fees, and court costs — “unless the tenant proves by a preponderance of the evidence that the failure of the tenant to vacate … was reasonable”. The subsection closes by pointing back the other way: if the landlord consents to the tenant’s continued occupancy, § 55.1-1204 applies.

That defence is a genuine one. It is the tenant’s to prove, on the balance of probabilities, but its presence means a holdover in Virginia is not treated as automatically indefensible — the circumstances matter.

Section 55.1-1253(C) also lets a lease provide for liquidated damages for each day the tenant remains after the termination date specified in the landlord’s notice. Two things bound it, and both are easy to lose.

First, the penalty must be a reasonable liquidated damage penalty. That word is in the statute and is not decoration: a charge can sit under the numerical ceiling and still fail as unreasonable.

Second, there are two ceilings, not one. The general one is “not to exceed an amount equal to 150 percent of the per diem of the monthly rent”. But if the dwelling unit is a public housing unit, or another housing unit subject to regulation by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, any liquidated damage penalty “shall not exceed an amount equal to the per diem of the monthly rent set out in the lease agreement” — the per diem itself, that is, 100 per cent rather than 150. If a Virginia lease in front of you sets a daily holdover charge, those are the two things to measure it against, in that order.

Almost every Virginia rule on this page turns on a fact rather than a judgement: how many units the landlord owns, whether the lease contains a renewal option or an automatic-renewal provision, whether the tenancy is a periodic one created under § 55.1-1253(C), when notice was given, what the rent was and what it is becoming.

Those are all easy to record at the moment of renewal and awkward to establish afterwards — particularly the notice date, which is what § 55.1-1204(K) is measured by, and which is measured differently before and after 1 July 2027. A extension document that captures them removes the argument before it starts, and the form on this page is built to ask for exactly those fields.

The captured Virginia material for this page is § 55.1-1204 and § 55.1-1253, read from Virginia Law. Both captures are section prose rather than an index page — worth saying because this host answers an invalid section number with the chapter index, which can look like a valid response.

An earlier version of this page said § 55.1-1204 “was not read end to end”. That was wrong — the section was captured in full, subsections (A) to (K), and in fact twice, because the host serves both the current text and the version effective 1 July 2027. Missing the second version is what the correction above repairs. The note is recorded rather than quietly dropped, because an inaccurate account of what was researched is as misleading as an inaccurate account of the law.

Local ordinances were not searched and no case law was consulted. Check the current text before relying on the thresholds, which are the kind of figure legislatures revisit — as subsection (K) itself demonstrates.

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

• If the tenancy is periodic instead, use the section 55.1-1253(A) periods. At least 30 days before the next rent due date for month-to-month – and that one is subject to the words unless the rental agreement provides for a different notice period. Week-to-week is at least seven days before the next rent due date, and the statute attaches no such rider to it. Either party may give the notice.

An extension 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 Virginia 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 Virginia 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 Virginia landlord tenant laws.

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