Free California Abandoned Property Notice

A tenant has gone and the unit is not empty. What California requires next depends entirely on how the tenancy ended, and the state answers that question in two different codes. The Civil Code carries a full notice-and-sale procedure for goods left after a tenancy terminates and the tenant vacates. The Code of Civil Procedure carries a separate one for goods left after the sheriff executes a writ of possession, and it is not the same procedure with a different cover sheet — the person who must be notified is different. A third chapter covers the tenant who comes back and asks. This page sets out all three in the statutes’ own words, and is careful about the two things California pages get wrong most often: who has to be notified after an eviction, and whether unpaid rent may come out of what the goods fetch.

Fill in the fields below and the generator produces a dated notice of right to reclaim abandoned property you can print, sign, serve and keep a copy of. Nothing is stored and there is no charge. Fields you leave blank print as a dash so you can complete them by hand.

Watch: Free California Abandoned Property Notice — Fillable PDF explained

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Unlike most documents in this library, this one has a statutory model. § 1984(a) prints a form headed Notice of Right to Reclaim Abandoned Property and says a notice “in substantially the following form … satisfies the requirements of Section 1983.” § 1985 prints the parallel form for a person other than the former tenant, and that one has no subdivision-(b) statement at all. The subdivision-(b) rule is where drafters slip: § 1984(b) says the tenant’s notice “shall also contain one of the following statements” — either the public-sale statement, which tells the former tenant that after sale and deduction of the costs of storage, advertising and sale “the remaining money will be paid over to the county,” or the low-value statement, which tells them the property may be kept, sold or destroyed without further notice. One of them, not both. A notice carrying both statements tells the reader two contradictory things about the same goods. The generator above produces a dated notice with the description, the claim date and the delivery record in the places the sections put them, so the document you keep matches the document the statute describes.

• The full name of the former tenant, and of any other person the landlord reasonably believes to own property left behind — § 1983(a) requires notice to both.
• The address of the premises the property was left at, with the unit number.
• A description of the property “reasonably adequate to permit the owner of the property to identify it” — § 1983(b).
• Sealed containers described as containers, using the § 1983(b) exception rather than opening them to inventory the contents.
• A statement that reasonable costs of storage may be charged before the property is returned — storage, and not rent.
• Where the property may be claimed, including the address and the hours.
• The claim date, which must be not less than 15 days after personal delivery or 18 days after mailing — § 1983(b).
• Exactly one of the two § 1984(b) statements, chosen according to what the landlord actually intends to do with the goods.
• The date the notice was signed, and how and where each copy was delivered — including the second copy to the vacated premises if the former tenant was served by mail.
• Contact details for the landlord or the person handling the claim.
• The landlord’s signature.

• Serving the tenant a § 1983 notice after a writ of possession. CCP § 1174(f) requires it only “to any person (other than the tenant).” The tenant’s warning is in the writ, and the tenant’s 15 days run from when the judgment creditor takes possession — CCP § 715.010(b)(3).
• Holding the goods against unpaid rent. Chapter 5 conditions release on “the reasonable cost of storage” alone (§ 1987(a)), and rent is not among the deductions § 1988(c) allows from a sale.
• Keeping the surplus. § 1988(c) sends any unclaimed balance to the county treasury within 30 days of the sale, and the former tenant may claim it from the county for a year.
• Mailing the notice to the last known address and stopping there. § 1983(c) adds a second copy to the vacated premises whenever the former tenant is served by mail, and a further copy to any other address where the person may reasonably be expected to receive it.
• Emailing the notice instead of serving it. § 1983(c) says the landlord “may also” send it by email where the tenant supplied an address. Additive, never a substitute.
• Putting both § 1984(b) statements in the same notice. The subdivision says “one of the following statements.”
• Charging two people for the same storage. § 1990(b): “the landlord shall not charge more than one person for the same costs.”
• Charging storage to a tenant who came straight back. §§ 1987(c) and 1990(c) bar any storage charge where the former tenant reclaims property left in the dwelling within two days of vacating.

It is the written notice Civil Code § 1983 requires before a California landlord may store, sell or dispose of personal property a former tenant left behind — and § 1984 prints the model form, headed “Notice of Right to Reclaim Abandoned Property.” The chapter it belongs to is Chapter 5 of Title 5, Part 4, Division 3 of the Civil Code, printed on the official host as “CHAPTER 5. Disposition of Personal Property Remaining on Premises at Termination of Tenancy [1980 – 1991].”

The notice does three jobs at once. It tells the person entitled to the goods what is being held and where; it tells them that reasonable costs of storage may be charged before the property is returned; and it fixes the date after which the landlord may sell or dispose of the property. That last function is why the date is regulated: § 1983(b) sets a statutory floor beneath it, and a notice with a shorter date is not a notice that merely reads badly — it is a notice that does not satisfy the section it is written under.

What the notice does not do is decide whether the tenancy is over. That is a separate question governed by separate law, and Civil Code § 1951.3 is the section most often mistaken for this one. § 1951.3 is a notice of belief of abandonment of the real property — it terminates the lease, not the goods. It may be given only where rent has been “due and unpaid for at least 14 consecutive days” and the lessor reasonably believes the lessee has abandoned the property, and its own subdivision (f)(2) makes the boundary explicit: “The fact that the lessor knew that the lessee left personal property on the real property does not, of itself, justify a finding that the lessor did not reasonably believe that the lessee had abandoned the real property.” § 1991 permits the two notices to be combined but is careful that neither substitutes for the other: the § 1983 notice “may, but need not,” be given at the same time, and the notices “may, but need not,” be combined in one document.

Answer this first, because the tracks do not share a recipient or a deadline.

Track one — Civil Code §§ 1980 to 1991. This is the ordinary case: the tenancy has terminated and the tenant has vacated, whether by moving out or by walking away. § 1981(a) sets the scope in its own words: the chapter provides a procedure “for the disposition of personal property that remains on the premises after a tenancy has terminated and the premises have been vacated by the tenant.” Notice goes to the tenant and to any other believed owner, and the claim date is the one the landlord writes into the notice inside the § 1983(b) minimum.

Track two — Code of Civil Procedure § 715.030 into § 1174(e) to (m). This is what happens when the sheriff executes a writ of possession. The routing sentence is explicit: “The disposition of personal property remaining on the real property after the judgment creditor is placed in possession thereof pursuant to the writ of possession is governed by subdivisions (e) to (m), inclusive, of Section 1174.” The same sentence performs a substitution that catches people out — in § 1174, “landlord” is read as the judgment creditor and “tenant” as the judgment debtor or other occupant. So the parties change names as well as tracks.

Track three — Civil Code § 1965. Chapter 4.5, added in 1988, covers the former tenant who asks for the goods back. The tenant must request them in writing “within 18 days of vacating the premises”; the landlord’s written demand for costs must go out “within five days after the actual receipt of the tenant’s request”; the tenant must claim and remove the property at a mutually agreed reasonable time but “not later than 72 hours after the tender”; and § 1965(e)(1) provides that “Three days is presumed to be a reasonable time” for the landlord to surrender it. § 1965(c) keeps the tracks apart: the chapter does not apply where disposition has already been initiated or completed under Chapter 5, or where the occupancy is one defined by § 1940(b).

The tracks converge only at the back end. § 1174(g) imposes the same storage duty in almost the same words as § 1986; § 1174(h) measures costs “as provided in Section 1990 of the Civil Code”; § 1174(i) sends property not released to be “disposed of pursuant to Section 1988 of the Civil Code”; and § 1174(m) borrows the § 1980 meanings of “owner,” “premises” and “reasonable belief.” The machinery is shared. The notice is not.

Where a matter is still heading toward possession rather than away from it, the sequence before this one is set out in our guide to California eviction notice laws.

On the ordinary track, both the tenant and any other believed owner — and on the post-writ track, only persons other than the tenant.

§ 1983(a), verbatim: “Where personal property remains on the premises after a tenancy has terminated and the premises have been vacated by the tenant, the landlord shall give written notice to the tenant and to any other person the landlord reasonably believes to be the owner of the property. If the property consists of records, the tenant shall be presumed to be the owner of the records for the purposes of this chapter.” The words written notice matter: unlike some California tenant remedies, oral notice does not satisfy this section. And “reasonable belief” is not a loose standard — § 1980 defines it for the chapter, and § 1174(m) imports that definition into the post-writ track.

§ 1983(c) governs delivery, and it contains three requirements pages routinely reduce to one. The notice is “personally delivered to the person to be notified or sent by first-class mail, postage prepaid, to the person to be notified at his or her last known address and, if there is reason to believe that the notice sent to that address will not be received by that person, also to any other address known to the landlord where the person may reasonably be expected to receive the notice. If the notice is sent by mail to the former tenant, one copy shall be sent to the premises vacated by the tenant. If the former tenant provided the landlord with the tenant’s email address, the landlord may also send the notice by email.”

So: the address is the last known address, not a forwarding address and not the premises alone. A second copy goes to the vacated premises whenever the former tenant is served by mail. Email is additive and optional — the statute says “may also,” which is the language of an extra copy, not of a delivery method. And certified mail is nowhere in the section: first-class is what § 1983(c) names.

There is no fixed number of storage days in California. There is a duty to store and a claim deadline the landlord sets inside a statutory minimum. That is a different shape from the states that publish a flat number, and it is why how many days has no honest one-number answer here.

The duty is § 1986: the property “shall either be left on the vacated premises or be stored by the landlord in a place of safekeeping until the landlord either releases the property pursuant to Section 1987 or disposes of the property pursuant to Section 1988. The landlord shall exercise reasonable care in storing the property, but he is not liable to the tenant or any other owner for any loss not caused by his deliberate or negligent act.” The post-writ equivalent is § 1174(g): “The landlord shall store the personal property in a place of safekeeping until it is either released pursuant to subdivision (h) or disposed of pursuant to subdivision (i).”

The deadline is the date the landlord writes into the notice, and § 1983(b) sets the floor under it: “The date specified in the notice shall be a date not less than 15 days after the notice is personally delivered or, if mailed, not less than 18 days after the notice is deposited in the mail.” Those are minimums, not targets. Nothing stops a landlord specifying a later date, and the storage duty runs until release or disposal, however long that takes.

There is also a short free window that two separate sections protect, and it is almost always missing from competitor pages. § 1987(c) requires the landlord to release the property and “shall not require the former tenant to pay the cost of storage if the property remained in the dwelling and the former tenant or other person reasonably believed by the landlord to be its owner reclaims the property within two days of vacating the dwelling.” § 1990(c) says the same from the costs side: “Costs shall not be assessed if the former tenant reclaims property stored on the premises within two days of having vacated the premises.” The § 1984 and § 1985 forms each carry the matching prompt inviting the reader to claim by a date “not less than 2 days after the former tenant vacated the premises” to minimise storage costs.

Not under this chapter. Chapter 5 authorises the recovery of storage costs and nothing else. This is the sharpest difference between California and states such as Texas, where the statute grants a landlord’s lien for unpaid rent; California’s chapter grants no such thing, and the contrast is worth stating plainly because national summaries flatten the two into one rule.

Three provisions settle it. Release — § 1987(a) requires the landlord to release the property to the former tenant or a believed owner “if that tenant or other person pays the reasonable cost of storage and takes possession of the property not later than the date specified in the notice.” Storage cost is the whole condition. Sale deductions — § 1988(c) permits deduction only of “the costs of storage, advertising, and sale.” Rent is not on that list. The balance — it goes to the county, not against the landlord’s rent claim.

§ 1990 then defines and fences what may be charged. A former tenant may be required to pay “the reasonable costs of storage for all the personal property remaining on the premises at the termination of the tenancy which are unpaid at the time the claim is made”; an owner other than the former tenant may be required to pay them “for only the property in which he or she claims an interest”; “the landlord shall not charge more than one person for the same costs”; and where the property is stored on the premises, “the cost of storage shall be the fair rental value of the space reasonably required for that storage for the term of the storage.” That last sentence is a measure, not an invitation — it prices the space actually used, not the unit.

One honest limit on this answer. Everything above is about Chapter 5. Whether any lien for rent exists outside the chapter is a separate question we did not verify: § 1981(e) expressly leaves outside rights and liabilities untouched, and § 1981(b) carves several other statutes out of the chapter entirely. So the accurate statement is that Chapter 5 gives a California landlord no right to hold or sell left-behind goods against unpaid rent — not that no such right could exist anywhere in California law. Rent arrears are a money claim, and the separate question of what may be withheld from a deposit is covered in our guide to California security deposit laws.

The county gets any balance, and the former tenant has a year to claim it.

Sale is public. § 1988(a): if the property is not released under § 1987, “it shall be sold at public sale by competitive bidding,” and “Nothing in this section shall be construed to preclude the landlord or tenant from bidding on the property at the public sale.” The same subdivision carries the one exception: where the landlord reasonably believes the total resale value of the property not released falls under the threshold § 1988(a) states, the landlord may retain the property for their own use or dispose of it in any manner. Three qualifiers travel with that exception and are routinely dropped — it is measured on the total resale value of the property not released, it turns on what the landlord reasonably believes as § 1980 defines that term, and it permits keeping the goods, not merely discarding them. The same threshold governs the post-writ track, because § 1174(i) routes disposal there.

Publication is regulated too. § 1988(b) requires notice of the time and place of the public sale “by publication pursuant to Section 6066 of the Government Code in a newspaper of general circulation published in the county where the sale is to be held. The last publication shall be not less than five days before the sale is to be held.” And the sale notice “shall not be published before the last of the dates specified for taking possession of the property in any notice given pursuant to Section 1983” — the advertising cannot start until the claim period has run out. We did not read Government Code § 6066 itself, so we do not state how many publications it requires; the sentence above is what § 1988(b) says on its own.

Then the money. § 1988(c), verbatim: “After deduction of the costs of storage, advertising, and sale, any balance of the proceeds of the sale which is not claimed by the former tenant or an owner other than such tenant shall be paid into the treasury of the county in which the sale took place not later than 30 days after the date of sale. The former tenant or other owner may claim the balance within one year from the date of payment to the county by making application to the county treasurer or other official designated by the county.”

Before the sale there is still a way back. § 1987(b) requires the landlord to release the property to the former tenant “if he or she claims it prior to the time it is sold” and pays the reasonable cost of “storage, advertising, and sale incurred prior to the time the property is withdrawn from sale.” The list is the same three items again — and again, rent is not one of them.

Immunity, and that is the point of the chapter. § 1989 protects a landlord who complies, both as to property released under § 1987 and as to property disposed of under § 1988. The protection is not unlimited: the section carves out a person whom the landlord believed or reasonably should have believed had an interest in the property and whose address the landlord knew or should have known on reasonable investigation. CCP § 1174(j) to (l) is the identical rule for the post-writ track.

That exception is the reason the § 1983(a) duty to notify “any other person the landlord reasonably believes to be the owner” is worth taking seriously rather than treating as boilerplate. It is also why § 1983(b) ties the limitation of liability to the description: the § 1989 protection “does not protect the landlord from any liability arising from the disposition of property not described in the notice.” An under-described notice buys less immunity than a careful one.

The honest answer is layered, and it should not be flattened to yes or no. California’s general residential anti-waiver statute, Civ. Code § 1953, was fetched for this page as a control, and the § 1980 series is not in its subdivision (a) list. That list covers a tenant’s rights under § 1950.5 or § 1954, the right to assert a future cause of action, “his right to a notice or hearing required by law,” procedural rights in litigation, and the right to have the landlord exercise a duty of care to prevent personal injury or personal property damage.

Two of those categories nonetheless reach into this area. A tenant’s “right to a notice … required by law” describes the § 1983 notice, and a duty of care to prevent personal property damage describes what § 1986 imposes. Outside those, § 1953(b) is the operative rule: a lease term modifying a statutory right is void as contrary to public policy “unless the lease or rental agreement is presented to the lessee before he takes actual possession of the premises,” and § 1953(c) confines the section to agreements executed on or after January 1, 1976.

§ 1965 also carries its own penalty, which a lease cannot rewrite simply by saying so: § 1965(e) makes a landlord who retains property in violation of that chapter liable for actual damages not exceeding the value of the property, plus a sum the section fixes for each bad faith violation, plus attorney’s fees and costs in the court’s discretion. We read no case law for this page, so we do not tell you how a court has resolved a lease clause purporting to contract out of Chapter 5 — only what the statutes say. The wider residential framework is mapped in our guide to California landlord tenant laws.

§ 1981(b) to (d) writes the exclusions out expressly, and each one sends the reader to a different body of law. The chapter does not apply where Civ. Code § 1862.5, § 2080.8, § 2080.9, or §§ 2081 to 2081.6 apply, nor to property owned by a public utility that exists to provide utility services. It does not apply to a manufactured home as defined in Health and Safety Code § 18007, a mobilehome as defined in § 18008, or a commercial coach as defined in § 18001.8, including attachments and contents. And it does not apply to an animal covered by Civ. Code § 1815(d) or by the named chapter of the Food and Agricultural Code; those animals are disposed of under those provisions instead.

The post-writ track carries its own vehicle carve-out: CCP § 715.010(b)(3) speaks of “any personal property, except a mobilehome.” And § 1965 has a parallel exclusion for a transient occupancy defined by § 1940(b).

Lost property is routed away before any of this begins. § 1982(a) sends property the landlord reasonably believes to have been lost to the police or sheriff under the Civil Code’s lost-property article, and protects the landlord who complies; only “if the appropriate police or sheriff’s department refuses to accept property” may the landlord dispose of it under this chapter. The post-writ version adds a sentence with real consequences: if the department refuses the property, “it shall be deemed not to have been lost” for that subdivision’s purposes. We did not read the lost-property article itself, so what the department will require of a landlord who brings goods in is outside what we can state here.

Everything above turns on one question — what happens to the things a tenant leaves behind — and the answer is what it is because California runs three separate tracks and a writ moves the tenant off the notice entirely. The route the tenancy took decides which rule applies, so the notice that ended it and the money still in dispute are governed separately.

California eviction notice laws. California security deposit laws. California landlord tenant laws.

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