Free Texas Abandoned Property Notice

Most pages about a Texas tenant’s left-behind belongings begin with a number of days. There isn’t one. Texas has no general abandoned-property statute for a residential tenancy that ends by a voluntary move-out, and the two sections that mention abandoned contents at all permit removal without saying a word about what happens next. That absence is the most important fact on this page, and it is also the reason the same three errors keep circulating: a commercial 60-day rule imported into an apartment, a chapter of the Property Code that is literally titled “Abandonment of Personal Property” and has nothing to do with landlords, and an anti-waiver section that does not reach the rule people cite it for. This page sets out what the Texas statutes actually say, in their own words, track by track.

Fill in the fields below and the generator produces a dated record of property left behind 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.

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Texas prescribes no abandoned-property notice form, because it prescribes no abandoned-property procedure for a residential move-out. What the Property Code does prescribe is contents, in two places, and both are worth building a document around. § 54.044(b) requires that a seizure notice state “the amount of delinquent rent and the name, address, and telephone number of the person the tenant may contact regarding the amount owed,” and that it “also state that the property will be promptly returned on full payment of the delinquent rent.” § 54.045(b) requires a pre-sale notice containing the date, time and place of the sale, an itemized account of the amount owed, and the contact details for the sale, the amount owed and the tenant’s redemption right. Those two sections are the model this record is built against; where you are asserting the lien, the section’s own contents list is what your notice must carry, and the document this page generates is not that notice — it is a dated, itemized record of what was left and where it is, plus a delivery record. That record matters more in Texas than almost anywhere, because § 54.045(b) is the only rule in this corpus that demands two mailings of the same notice, first class and certified with return receipt. A notice sent only one of those ways has not been sent the way the section describes.

• The full names of the landlord and of every tenant on the lease.
• The address of the leased premises, with the unit number.
• The date the notice is given, and the date any entry, removal or seizure took place.
• An itemized list of the items removed — § 54.044(b) requires one on a seizure, and an inventory is the only record that later shows what was and was not taken.
• The amount of delinquent rent claimed, stated as an itemized account — §§ 54.044(b) and 54.045(b)(2).
• The name, address and telephone number of the person the tenant may contact about the amount owed — § 54.044(b).
• A statement that the property will be promptly returned on full payment of the delinquent rent — § 54.044(b) makes this mandatory on a seizure notice.
• For a pre-sale notice, the date, time and place of the sale, and the tenant’s right to redeem under § 54.045(e) — with the notice given not later than the 30th day before the sale.
• The lease provision relied on, since seizure and sale each require written-lease authorisation.
• How the notice was delivered and to what address — including both mailings where § 54.045(b) applies.
• The signature of the landlord or the landlord’s agent.

• Using the 60-day disposal rule on a residential tenancy. § 93.002(d) and (e) sit in Chapter 93, Commercial Tenancies. The presumption of abandonment, the 60 days and the certified-mail notice are commercial only.
• Citing Property Code Chapter 72. It is titled “Abandonment of Personal Property” and it is the state’s unclaimed-property regime — a three-year presumption keyed on a “holder” and routed to the Comptroller under Chapter 74. It contains no landlord’s remedy.
• Selling seized property without a written lease clause. § 54.045(a): property seized under § 54.044 “may not be sold or otherwise disposed of unless the sale or disposition is authorized in a written lease.”
• Charging packing, removal or storage without a lease clause. § 54.044(c): “Unless authorized in a written lease, the landlord is not entitled to collect a charge for packing, removing, or storing property seized under this section.”
• Treating the lien as a licence to change the locks. § 92.0081 fences the delinquency lock-change tightly, and § 92.0081(f) gives the tenant a key “at any hour, regardless of whether the tenant pays the delinquent rent.”
• Seizing exempt property. § 54.042 lists fifteen categories a residential landlord’s lien does not attach to at all, from wearing apparel to one automobile and one truck.
• Sending the pre-sale notice one way. § 54.045(b) requires it “by both first class mail and certified mail, return receipt requested.” The conjunction is statutory.
• Citing § 92.006 as the anti-waiver rule for removal of property. § 92.006 enumerates Subchapters B through G. § 92.0081 is in Subchapter A, which is exactly why it carries its own anti-waiver clause at § 92.0081(j).

Not for a residential tenant who simply moves out. Texas has no general abandoned-property statute for that case — no definition of abandonment, no storage period, no notice form, no value threshold and no disposal procedure. Everything the Property Code does say about a tenant’s left-behind belongings hangs off a different event: a writ of possession, a landlord’s lien for unpaid rent, the death of a sole tenant, or a commercial tenancy.

This is a tested finding, not an admission that we could not find something. A caption census was run across the four chapters that could plausibly contain such a section — Chapter 24 (Forcible Entry and Detainer), Chapter 54 (Landlord’s Liens), Chapter 92 (Residential Tenancies) and Chapter 93 (Commercial Tenancies). Each chapter returned zero abandoned-property captions, and each search was paired with a control proving the census could see neighbouring captions in the very same bytes. The identical word-probe fires repeatedly elsewhere in the Code. A probe that works everywhere else and returns nothing here is a real negative.

Chapter 92’s full caption list was read end to end. The nearest sections to an abandoned-property rule are § 92.013, a notice rule about a change of policy affecting a tenant’s personal property; § 92.014, a rule about the personal property and security deposit of a deceased tenant; and § 92.0081, a lockout rule that merely permits removal. Chapter 91, which carries provisions generally applicable to landlords and tenants, has five sections in total and none concerns personal property.

An absence of statute is not an absence of duty. § 54.047 says so directly: “This subchapter does not affect or diminish any other rights or obligations arising under common law or any statute.” We read no Texas case law for this page and researched no common law, so what a Texas landlord owes a departed tenant outside the Property Code is a question this page does not answer. What it can say is that the Property Code does not supply the answer.

It is, and it is the wrong chapter. This collision matters because Property Code Chapter 72 is usually the first thing a search shaped like this page’s title turns up, and its title is a perfect match for a question it does not answer.

Chapter 72 is the state’s unclaimed-property regime. § 72.101(a) presumes personal property abandoned if, for longer than three years, “(1) the location of the owner of the property is unknown to the holder of the property; and (2) according to the knowledge and records of the holder of the property, a claim to the property has not been asserted or an act of ownership of the property has not been exercised.” And § 72.001(d) routes it onward: a “holder of property presumed abandoned under this chapter is subject to the procedures of Chapter 74.”

Note the vocabulary. The actor is a holder, not a landlord; the clock is three years, not a matter of days; and the destination is the Comptroller’s reporting and claims process, not a sale on the landlord’s account. A word-probe for “landlord” over the § 72.001 capture returns zero hits against a working control. A page citing Chapter 72 for a tenant’s left-behind sofa is citing the escheat statute. We did not read Chapter 74, so this page establishes only that Chapter 72 is not a landlord’s remedy — not what the Comptroller pipeline requires of anyone who is caught by it.

It goes outside. Texas does not require the landlord to store it, and says so in one sentence.

§ 24.0061(d) orders the officer executing the writ to post a written warning “of at least 8-1/2 by 11 inches on the exterior of the front door of the rental unit” naming the date and time of execution “not sooner than 24 hours after the warning is posted”; then, on execution, to deliver possession to the landlord, instruct the occupants to leave and physically remove them if they do not, instruct that all personal property be removed, and “place, or have an authorized person place, the removed personal property outside the rental unit at a nearby location, but not blocking a public sidewalk, passageway, or street and not while it is raining, sleeting, or snowing, except as provided by Subsection (d-1).”

The weather clause is real statutory text, and it is one of the most frequently omitted lines in Texas landlord-tenant law. So is the placement constraint. Neither is a courtesy; both are part of what the writ orders.

Then § 24.0061(f), verbatim: “The officer may not require the landlord to store the property.” That single sentence explains the design of the whole track. Storage is not a landlord duty here — it is a service § 24.0061(e) allows the officer to buy: the writ “shall authorize the officer, at the officer’s discretion, to engage the services of a bonded or insured warehouseman to remove and store, subject to applicable law, part or all of the property at no cost to the landlord or the officer executing the writ.”

There is a third possibility. § 24.0061(d-1) permits — but does not require — a municipality to provide, free to the landlord and to the owner of the property, “a portable, closed container into which the removed personal property shall be placed,” and allows the municipality to remove that container and dispose of the contents “by any lawful means if the owner of the removed personal property does not recover the property from the container within a reasonable time.” That is permissive on the city, not a right either party can invoke, and “a reasonable time” is the only such standard anywhere in this corpus. Which Texas municipalities actually offer containers was not investigated for this page. The document that starts this track is covered on our Texas writ of possession request form, and the notices that precede it are set out in our guide to Texas eviction notice laws.

Where a warehouseman is engaged, Texas produces its fullest set of rules — and the seller at the end of them is the warehouseman, not the landlord.

§ 24.0062(a): where property removed under a writ is stored in a bonded or insured public warehouse, “the warehouseman has a lien on the property to the extent of any reasonable storage and moving charges incurred by the warehouseman. The lien does not attach to any property until the property has been stored by the warehouseman.”

There are three redemption windows, not one. § 24.0062(d): “On demand by the tenant during the time the warehouseman is removing the property from the tenant’s premises and before the warehouseman permanently leaves the tenant’s premises, the warehouseman shall return to the tenant all property requested by the tenant, without charge.” § 24.0062(f): during the first 30 days after the date of storage, the warehouseman “may not require payment of removal or storage charges for other items as a condition for redeeming the items described by Subsection (e).” And § 24.0062(g): after the 30-day period and before sale, on payment of all unpaid moving and storage charges on all the property, the warehouseman shall return all previously unredeemed property at the warehouse.

The tenant also gets a court. § 24.0062(i) lets the tenant, before sale, file suit in the justice court that rendered the eviction judgment or another court of competent jurisdiction to recover the exempt items or to challenge the charges as unreasonable; those proceedings “have precedence over other matters on the court’s docket,” and the justice court has jurisdiction “regardless of the amount in controversy.” § 24.0062(h) bars the warehouseman from recovering any moving or storage charge the court finds unreasonable, and § 24.0062(k) gives the prevailing party actual damages, attorney’s fees, court costs and the withheld property or its value.

Any sale is routed out of the Property Code: § 24.0062(j) requires it be conducted under Business and Commerce Code § 7.210 and Subchapters D and F of Chapter 9. We did not read those provisions, so this page does not state the notice, timing or commercial-reasonableness rules the sale itself must satisfy.

Yes. Texas grants a statutory landlord’s lien for unpaid rent, and it is automatic. This is where Texas parts company most sharply with states such as California, which withhold that lien entirely and send any sale surplus to a public treasury rather than against the rent.

§ 54.041 is the whole section, verbatim: “A landlord of a single or multifamily residence has a lien for unpaid rent that is due. The lien attaches to nonexempt property that is in the residence or that the tenant has stored in a storage room.”

The grant is automatic; every step of enforcing it is conditioned. A lien created by the lease rather than the statute is “not enforceable unless it is underlined or printed in conspicuous bold print in the lease agreement” (§ 54.043(a)). Seizure is lawful only against nonexempt property and only “if it is authorized by a written lease and can be accomplished without a breach of the peace” (§ 54.044(a)). Charges for packing, removing or storing seized property cannot be collected unless the written lease authorises them (§ 54.044(c)). Sale requires its own written-lease authorisation (§ 54.045(a)). And § 54.048 lets the tenant replevy: “At any time before judgment in a suit for unpaid rent, the tenant may replevy any of the property that has been seized, if the property has not been claimed or sold, by posting a bond in an amount approved by the court, payable to the landlord.”

Getting it wrong is priced. § 54.046 makes a landlord or agent who wilfully violates the subchapter liable for actual damages, return of unsold seized property, return of the proceeds of any sale, a sum the section fixes as one month’s rent plus a stated amount, and reasonable attorney’s fees — less any amount for which the tenant is liable. The word “wilfully” is the trigger and is spelled that way in the statute. § 92.0081(h) carries a parallel civil penalty for a lockout violation, on the same one-month-plus-a-fixed-sum shape. The wider framework these sit in is mapped in our guide to Texas landlord tenant laws.

On a lien sale: the landlord, up to the rent — then the tenant. Never the state.

§ 54.045(c), verbatim: a sale under the section is subject to a recorded chattel mortgage or financing statement, and “The property shall be sold to the highest cash bidder. Proceeds from the sale shall be applied first to delinquent rents and, if authorized by the written lease, reasonable packing, moving, storage, and sale costs.” Note the order and the condition. Rent comes first. Costs come second, and only where the written lease says so.

§ 54.045(d), verbatim: “Any sale proceeds remaining after payment of the amounts authorized in Subsection (c) of this section shall be mailed to the tenant at the tenant’s last known address not later than the 30th day after the date of the sale. The landlord shall provide the tenant with an accounting of all proceeds of the sale not later than the 30th day after the date on which the tenant makes a written request for the accounting.” The surplus goes to the tenant, and the accounting is on request rather than automatic.

Redemption survives right up to the hammer. § 54.045(e): “The tenant may redeem the property at any time before the property is sold by paying to the landlord or the landlord’s agent all delinquent rents and, if authorized in the written lease, all reasonable packing, moving, storage, and sale costs.”

Two other routes end differently and should not be blurred into this one. A warehouseman’s sale under § 24.0062 satisfies the warehouseman’s moving and storage charges — not the landlord’s rent. And on a writ where no warehouseman is engaged there is nothing to sell at all: the property is set outside under § 24.0061(d)(2)(D) or goes into a municipal container, and the landlord never takes custody. What may be deducted from a deposit is a separate question again, covered in our guide to Texas security deposit laws.

No. There is no value threshold anywhere in Texas — Chapter 24, Chapter 54, Chapter 92 or Chapter 93. Texas draws its line with exempt categories instead. That is a structural difference from the states that publish a price, and it changes the question a landlord has to answer: not what is it worth but what kind of thing is it.

§ 54.042 lists what a residential landlord’s lien does not attach to at all: wearing apparel; tools, apparatus and books of a trade or profession; schoolbooks; a family library; family portraits and pictures; one couch, two living room chairs, and a dining table and chairs; beds and bedding; kitchen furniture and utensils; food and foodstuffs; medicine and medical supplies; one automobile and one truck; agricultural implements; children’s toys not commonly used by adults; goods the landlord or the landlord’s agent knows are owned by someone other than the tenant or an occupant; and goods the landlord or agent knows are subject to a recorded chattel mortgage or financing agreement.

§ 24.0062(e) — the property a warehouseman must return on demand within the first 30 days — is the same list, with the actor changed from the landlord to the warehouseman, plus one item: cash. The two lists are otherwise word for word identical, and presenting them as the same list drops the difference that matters on the writ track.

The answer changes by track, and on one of them the landlord is not the person who gives it.

Writ with a warehouseman — the officer gives it. § 24.0062(b) requires the officer executing the writ to deliver, in person at the time of execution or “by first class mail to the tenant’s last known address not later than 72 hours after execution of the writ if the tenant is not present,” a written notice stating the complete address and telephone number where the property may be redeemed, and stating the three redemption windows and the warehouseman’s lien and power of sale after 30 days. § 24.0062(c) adds a formatting command: the statement about redeeming without charge while the movers are still on site “must be underlined or in boldfaced print.” Certified mail is not required here.

Writ without a warehouseman — the notice is a posted warning. The § 24.0061(d) door warning is the only notice on that track, and there is no storage notice at all, because there is no storage.

Lien seizure — the notice goes inside the dwelling. § 54.044(b): “Immediately after seizing property under Subsection (a) of this section, the landlord or the landlord’s agent shall leave written notice of entry and an itemized list of the items removed. The notice and list shall be left in a conspicuous place within the dwelling.” It must state the delinquent rent and a contact, and “must also state that the property will be promptly returned on full payment of the delinquent rent.” This is the one notice in the corpus addressed to a place rather than an address.

Lien sale — the double mailing. § 54.045(b) requires notice “not later than the 30th day before the date of the sale,” sent “by both first class mail and certified mail, return receipt requested, at the tenant’s last known address,” containing the date, time and place of the sale, an itemized account of the amount owed, and the contact for the sale, the amount owed and the tenant’s redemption right.

Deceased sole tenant — the notice goes to a designated person. § 92.014(c)(5) permits the landlord to discard removed property only where a written request was mailed “by certified mail, return receipt requested” to the person the tenant designated, that person “failed to remove the property by the 30th day after the postmark date of the notice,” and the landlord “has not been contacted by anyone claiming the property” before discarding it.

Two counting habits are worth separating, because they run in opposite directions: § 54.045(b) counts backwards from the sale, while § 92.014 counts forwards from a postmark.

S.B. 38 (89th Legislature, Regular Session, 2025, Chapter 960) amended § 24.0061 effective January 1, 2026 — but it applies only to an eviction suit whose petition was filed on or after that date. The applicability clause is as important as the date, and stating the date alone is misleading. The enrolled bill reads: “The changes in law made by this Act apply only to an eviction suit in which the petition is filed on or after January 1, 2026. An eviction suit in which the petition is filed before January 1, 2026, is governed by the law as it existed immediately before January 1, 2026, and that law is continued in effect for that purpose.” So an eviction filed in late 2025 and executed in 2026 still runs on the older text.

What the Act touched: § 24.0061(a) redefines “premises” into a three-part test adding property “that is occupied by or in the possession of the person against whom the eviction suit is filed”; (b) drops a trailing default-judgment condition; a new subsection (b-1) provides that “The issuance of a writ of possession is a ministerial act not subject to review or delay” and that an officer “shall serve the writ of possession not later than the fifth business day after the date the writ is issued”; (c) now also reaches a judgment for possession under § 24.005106 and requires the court to mail a copy of a default judgment for possession to the premises by first class mail not later than 48 hours after entry; (h) broadens who may use reasonable force from a sheriff or constable to “an officer”; and (i) broadens the damages clause.

What it did not touch is the part this page is about. A census over the enrolled text found no reference to § 24.0062, § 54.04, § 92.0081 or § 93.002, and no occurrence of “warehouseman” or “abandon” at all. Subsections (d), (d-1), (e), (f) and (g) of § 24.0061 — the removal, the placement, the weather rule, the municipal container and the warehouseman authorisation — were not amended. S.B. 38 changed the eviction procedure around the abandoned-property machinery, and created no abandonment rule of its own.

One practical warning about sources. At least one widely used free statute site was still serving the pre-amendment text of § 24.0061 when this page was written, with an amendment history stopping in 2021. Reachability is not currency: a site can be perfectly available and years behind on a single section. The amendment relied on here was confirmed against the enrolled bill on the Legislature’s own server. We also did not search for rules the supreme court may have adopted under S.B. 38’s rulemaking direction, so practice in a particular court may differ from the bare statute.

Texas gives three different answers in the same code, and they have to be kept apart.

The residential landlord’s lien: not waivable. § 54.043(b): “A provision of a lease that purports to waive or diminish a right, liability, or exemption of this subchapter is void to the extent limited by this subchapter.”

Removal of property and lockouts: not waivable. § 92.0081(j): “A provision of a lease that purports to waive a right or to exempt a party from a liability or duty under this section is void.”

A deceased tenant: expressly variable. § 92.014(d): “In a written lease or other agreement, a landlord and a tenant may agree to a procedure different than the procedure in this section for removing, storing, or disposing of property in the leased premises of a deceased tenant.”

A commercial tenancy: the lease wins. § 93.002(h): “A lease supersedes this section to the extent of any conflict.” And §§ 24.0061 and 24.0062 contain no waiver or anti-waiver provision either way.

There is a trap in this area worth naming, because it is cited constantly and is simply the wrong section. § 92.006 does not reach § 92.0081. Its subsection (a) bars waiver of duties and remedies “concerning security deposits, security devices, the landlord’s disclosure of ownership and management, or utility cutoffs, as provided by Subchapter C, D, E, or G, respectively,” and its subsection (c) covers Subchapter B. That enumeration is Subchapters B through G. § 92.0081 sits in Subchapter A and is not on the list — which is precisely why the legislature gave it its own anti-waiver clause at § 92.0081(j). Citing § 92.006 as the authority for the removal-of-property rule cites a section that does not apply to it, even though the conclusion it is offered for happens to be right.

The unavoidable conclusion for a plain residential move-out is that the written lease is doing most of the work, because the Property Code is not doing any. That is an uncomfortable answer, but it is the accurate one, and it is more useful than a borrowed 60-day clock.

Everything above turns on one question — what happens to the things a tenant leaves behind — and the answer is what it is because in Texas the rule everyone quotes belongs to commercial tenancies. The route the tenancy took decides which rule applies, so the notice that ended it and the money still in dispute are governed separately.

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

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