Free Arkansas Lead Paint Disclosure

An Arkansas lead paint disclosure is the federally mandated form a landlord delivers to a prospective tenant before any lease of residential property constructed before 1978. It carries the fixed federal lead warning statement, states the lessor’s actual knowledge of lead-based paint and hazards, lists the records being handed over, documents the tenant’s receipt of the EPA pamphlet Protect Your Family From Lead in Your Home, captures any agent’s acknowledgment, and is signed and dated by every party. Authority is 42 U.S.C. 4852d (Section 1018 of Title X, the Residential Lead-Based Paint Hazard Reduction Act of 1992), implemented at 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart F (EPA) and 24 CFR Part 35 Subpart A (HUD). Arkansas imposes no lead paint disclosure statute of its own — the duty here is purely federal, and the Arkansas Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 2007 does not mention lead anywhere. What Arkansas does have is a lead contractor certification regime, which is a different thing entirely and is explained below. For the state-law picture on the condition of a rental, see our Arkansas habitability laws guide. Generate the form below, then read on for exactly what the rule requires.

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Arkansas lead paint disclosure overview

The lead paint disclosure — often called the Section 1018 disclosure, after the 1992 statute that created it — is the formal federal notice an Arkansas landlord delivers to a prospective tenant for any residential property constructed before 1978. It does four things in one document.

First, it puts the tenant on notice of potential lead exposure through the federally mandated lead warning statement, the fixed language at 40 CFR 745.113(b)(1) that must be included as an attachment to or within the lease.

Second, it transmits the lessor’s actual knowledge of lead-based paint or hazards in the dwelling. The lessor picks one of exactly two positions: known lead-based paint or hazards are present, with a description of what is known; or the lessor has no knowledge of lead-based paint or hazards in the housing. There is no third box, and there is no “maybe”.

Third, it transmits any reports the lessor holds from prior inspections, risk assessments, or hazard-reduction work. The lessor either provides copies of all available records and lists them, or affirmatively states that no reports or records exist.

Fourth, it documents the tenant’s receipt of the disclosure and of the EPA pamphlet. The signed acknowledgment is the landlord’s primary evidence in any later EPA or HUD inquiry or private civil action.

The disclosure is not optional and the duty is not waivable by agreement. A pre-1978 Arkansas rental leased without one exposes the landlord to government civil penalties and to a tenant’s private action for triple damages plus fees. Compliance takes fifteen minutes; non-compliance is the most expensive paperwork failure in pre-1978 rental practice. If you are also screening the applicant, the disclosure belongs in the same pre-lease packet as your tenant screening paperwork, because both have to be finished before the tenant signs.

No — Arkansas has no lead paint disclosure statute for landlords. This is the single most important thing to understand about lead compliance in Arkansas, and it is the opposite of what a lot of “Arkansas lead paint disclosure” pages imply. We verified it against primary text rather than assumed it, and here is exactly how.

The chapter that governs the landlord-tenant relationship in this state is the Arkansas Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 2007, A.C.A. 18-17-101 et seq. We read its provisions, and there is no lead, lead-based paint, lead hazard, or lead poisoning duty anywhere in it. There is no state disclosure form, no state lead registry, no state tenant-notice duty, and no state abatement mandate aimed at ordinary landlords. If you go looking for an Arkansas statute number for a landlord’s lead disclosure, there is not one to find. Every substantive requirement on this page comes from federal law: 42 U.S.C. 4852d, 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart F, and 24 CFR Part 35 Subpart A.

The Arkansas Lead-Based Paint-Hazard Act is a contractor rule, not a landlord rule

Arkansas does have a lead statute, and this is where nearly every summary goes wrong. The Arkansas Lead-Based Paint-Hazard Act of 2011 lives at A.C.A. 20-27-2501 et seq. (Acts 2011, No. 1011). Its own legislative-intent section, A.C.A. 20-27-2502, states verbatim that the General Assembly enacted the subchapter “to qualify the Department of Health to adopt, administer, and enforce a program for licensing lead-based paint activities, training programs, procedures, and requirements for the licensing and certification of individuals and firms engaged in lead-based paint activities and work practice standards for performing such activities.” Not one word of it is about what a landlord must tell a tenant. Here is what the subchapter actually contains:

The pattern is unmistakable. The Act regulates who may perform lead-based paint activities — inspection, risk assessment, and abatement. It says nothing about what a landlord must tell a tenant. A lead-contractor certification regime and a landlord disclosure duty are two different animals, and conflating them is the most common error in state-by-state lead content.

What the implementing rules actually regulate

The Board of Health rules under this Act are the Rules Pertaining to Lead-Based Paint Activities, codified at 20 CAR Part 130 (the Arkansas Department of Health rendering carries the register numbers 007.04.11 and, as currently published, 007.40.24). Their General Provisions state, in the agency’s own words, that the purpose of the rule is to “establish procedures and requirements for the licensing of lead-based paint activities training programs,” “contractors and consultants,” and “for the certification of individuals engaged in lead-based paint activities,” to set “work practice standards,” and to “require that all lead-based paint activities performed in target housing or child-occupied facilities be performed by a licensed lead-based paint consultant or contractor and certified individuals.”

The applicability clause says the rule “applies to all lead-based paint activities, as defined by this rule, conducted in target housing or child-occupied facilities.” Read the whole thing and the words that would signal a landlord duty — lessor, landlord, lease, tenant, disclosure — simply do not appear as an obligation on an owner who rents. The document regulates the trade, not the tenancy.

The federal records point this state regime creates

Here is where the state framework loops back into your federal duty. If you ever commissioned a licensed Arkansas firm to inspect, screen, assess, or abate lead at your property, you hold the resulting report — and the moment a report is in your possession it is a record “available to the lessor” within the meaning of 40 CFR 745.107(a)(4) and 745.113(b)(3). Federal law then requires you to list it and provide it to every prospective tenant of that pre-1978 building. The practical instruction: before you tick “no reports or records available”, go and look. A landlord who marks “no records” while a clearance report from a past abatement sits in a drawer has made a knowing false statement on a federal disclosure.

Where to find a licensed inspector or risk assessor in Arkansas

If you decide to have the property evaluated — and remember, you are never required to — the Arkansas Department of Health Lead-Based Paint Program is the body that licenses lead firms and certifies the individuals who perform inspections, risk assessments, and abatement under the 2011 Act. It is the authoritative answer to “who is allowed to test my Arkansas rental for lead,” and it can be reached at the Lead-Based Paint Program, 4815 West Markham Street, Slot 32, Little Rock, AR 72205 (501-671-1472). A report from someone outside that program is worth little, and abatement by an unlicensed party may itself breach the certification regime.

Every residential rental in Arkansas constructed before 1978 is covered, unless a narrow exclusion applies. The rule’s term of art is “target housing”, and its definition is the gateway to the entire scheme. Under 40 CFR 745.103, as amended effective 13 January 2025 (89 FR 89416), verbatim:

That sentence is compact and it is misread constantly, so parse it deliberately. The exception clause has two limbs, not one:

• Limb one: housing for the elderly or persons with disabilities. Elderly or disabled housing is outside the rule, but that exclusion is withdrawn the moment a child under six lives there or is expected to.
• Limb two: “or any 0-bedroom dwelling.” Since the 13 January 2025 amendment (89 FR 89416) the same parenthetical child-under-six condition governs this limb just as it governs the elderly-or-disabled limb: a 0-bedroom dwelling is target housing when a child under six resides or is expected to reside there. Before the amendment a studio was unconditional.

What counts as a 0-bedroom dwelling

The rule does not leave this to intuition. Also at 40 CFR 745.103, verbatim: “0-bedroom dwelling means any residential dwelling in which the living area is not separated from the sleeping area. The term includes efficiencies, studio apartments, dormitory housing, military barracks, and rentals of individual rooms in residential dwellings.”

That list matters more in Arkansas than landlords expect. Rentals of individual rooms in a residential dwelling are named expressly — so a landlord renting single rooms in an old house is renting 0-bedroom dwellings, and those lettings are outside the disclosure rule only when no child under six resides or is expected there — the 0-bedroom limb now carries the same child condition as the elderly and disabled limb (40 CFR 745.103 as amended eff. 13 January 2025). Dormitory housing is named too, which reaches a good deal of near-campus stock around Fayetteville, Conway, and Jonesboro. The test is architectural and simple: is the living area separated from the sleeping area? If not, it is a 0-bedroom dwelling.

Why 1978, and why the CPSC ban is not the trigger

The 1978 line traces to the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s ban on lead-containing paint, but the two dates are not the same rule and should never be conflated. 16 CFR 1303.1 bans paint manufactured after 27 February 1978. That is the historical reason 1978 is the dividing line — it is not the operative test for your disclosure duty.

Your test is the one in 745.103: was the housing constructed prior to 1978? That is a construction-date question, not a paint-manufacture question. You do not investigate when the paint was made, or whether any lead paint was actually used. A 1974 Arkansas duplex painted exclusively with lead-free paint is still target housing, because it was constructed before 1978. Verify the original construction date from the county assessor record, the certificate of occupancy, or the permit file — not from the listing, and not from the seller’s recollection. And note the date controls even through a gut renovation: a 1962 house stripped to the studs in 2001 is still target housing.

Four transactions are carved out of the disclosure rule entirely, and none of them depends on whether a child lives in the unit. 40 CFR 745.101 lists them. In an Arkansas rental context, one is irrelevant (foreclosure sales) and three matter:

A word on the short-term exemption, because Arkansas has genuine seasonal and corporate lettings. “Where no lease renewal or extension can occur” is doing real work. The question is not whether the lease was in fact renewed — it is whether renewal or extension can occur under the instrument. A 100-day lease with an option to extend fails the test on day one, before anyone exercises anything. If you want this exemption you need a lease that genuinely cannot be extended.

The generator produces the federal lessor disclosure with the lease-version lead warning statement, the knowledge item, the records item, the acknowledgment lines, and the certification block. It runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is transmitted anywhere.

40 CFR 745.113(b) requires exactly six elements, in the language of the contract, attached to or within the lease. Miss one and the disclosure is defective even if the other five are perfect. No competing Arkansas page itemises them, so here they are.

The Lead Warning Statement — and the version trap

The lease version required by 745.113(b)(1) reads, verbatim: “Housing built before 1978 may contain lead-based paint. Lead from paint, paint chips, and dust can pose health hazards if not managed properly. Lead exposure is especially harmful to young children and pregnant women. Before renting pre-1978 housing, lessors must disclose the presence of known lead-based paint and/or lead-based paint hazards in the dwelling. Lessees must also receive a federally approved pamphlet on lead poisoning prevention.”

That is the whole of it — five sentences. The sales version at 745.113(a)(1) is a different and considerably longer paragraph that opens “Every purchaser of any interest in residential real property…” and recommends a risk assessment prior to purchase. Dropping the sales paragraph onto a lease is one of the most common defects we see, and it usually travels with the 10-day inspection line, because both come from the sales form. If your disclosure mentions purchasers, buyers, or a recommendation to inspect prior to purchase, you are holding the wrong version.

An Arkansas landlord does not have to give a tenant 10 days to inspect for lead. That right does not exist for leases. This is the most widely repeated error in lead paint content, it appears in AI-generated answers, and it appears on pages that otherwise look authoritative.

Here is the provision, 40 CFR 745.110(a), verbatim and complete:

Purchaser. Purchase. Seller. The statute behind it, 42 U.S.C. 4852d(a)(1)(C), is scoped the same way. Now look at the other side of the rule: 40 CFR 745.113(a)(5) — on the sales disclosure — carries the statement that the purchaser received or waived the opportunity. Turn to 745.113(b), the lessor’s six elements listed above, and there is no inspection item at all. It is not shortened for leases. It is not conditional. It is absent.

You may of course offer a prospective tenant a chance to have the unit evaluated. That is a courtesy and, in an older Little Rock or Pine Bluff property with a young family moving in, often a smart one. But understand what you are doing: you are volunteering something, not discharging a legal duty, and you should not print it on the federal disclosure as though the rule required it. Nothing in 745.113(b) asks for it, and adding a waiver line invites a tenant to sign away a right they never had — which is a strange document to have to explain later.

The disclosure must be complete before the lessee is obligated under the lease. 40 CFR 745.107(a) sets the deadline in one clause: the required activities “shall be completed before the purchaser or lessee is obligated under any contract to purchase or lease target housing that is not otherwise an exempt transaction pursuant to 745.101.”

The same subsection adds the sentence every landlord should memorise: “Nothing in this section implies a positive obligation on the seller or lessor to conduct any evaluation or reduction activities.” You disclose what you know. You are not ordered to go find out.

“Obligated” is the operative word, and it does not mean “moved in”. Once the tenant has signed and is bound, you are late — and late delivery is the same violation as no delivery. There is no cure period, no grace window, and no way to fix it afterwards. The practical rule for Arkansas landlords: the disclosure and the pamphlet go in the tenant’s hands at or before the same sitting where the lease is signed, and never in the move-in packet.

Handing over the pamphlet is its own requirement, and forgetting it is a violation even if your disclosure form is flawless. 40 CFR 745.107(a)(1) requires the lessor to provide the lessee with an EPA-approved lead hazard information pamphlet — the document Protect Your Family From Lead in Your Home, or an equivalent pamphlet approved for use in that State by EPA. The statutory hook is 15 U.S.C. 2696.

Two practical points. First, the disclosure’s item (b)(4) has the tenant affirm receipt of the pamphlet — so if you never handed it over, you have induced a false attestation on a federal form. Second, the rule allows “an equivalent pamphlet that has been approved for use in that State by EPA” — we found no EPA-approved Arkansas-specific substitute, so the EPA document is the one to use; if you believe a state-specific pamphlet applies, confirm it with EPA rather than assume. Note which edition you delivered and when, and keep that note with the signed disclosure. It costs a line in a file and closes off an argument entirely.

Your records duty is not limited to the four walls of the unit you are leasing. This is where careful Arkansas landlords with multi-unit pre-1978 buildings get caught, and no ranking page covers it.

40 CFR 745.107(a)(4) requires the lessor to provide the lessee with “any records or reports available to the seller or lessor pertaining to lead-based paint and/or lead-based paint hazards in the target housing being sold or leased”, and then adds two sentences that most summaries drop. The first: “This requirement includes records or reports regarding common areas.” The second, quoted in full because its proviso does real work: “This requirement also includes records or reports regarding other residential dwellings in multifamily target housing, provided that such information is part of an evaluation or reduction of lead-based paint and/or lead-based paint hazards in the target housing as a whole.”

So a building-wide risk assessment that flagged a stairwell, a laundry room, a shared porch, or a neighbouring unit is within scope for every tenant in that pre-1978 building. Note the limit, though, and do not over-read this: a report about another unit comes into scope only where it forms part of an evaluation or reduction covering the target housing as a whole. A one-off assessment commissioned for a single neighbouring apartment, standing alone, is not swept in by (a)(4) — it is the building-wide character of the evaluation that pulls it in. “Common area” is itself defined at 745.103 as a portion of a building generally accessible to all residents/users — hallways, stairways, laundry and recreational rooms, playgrounds, community centers, and boundary fences.

“Available” is a defined term too, and it is broader than “in my desk”. 745.103: “Available means in the possession of or reasonably obtainable by the seller or lessor at the time of the disclosure.” Reasonably obtainable is the phrase to sit with. A report your property manager holds, or one your own licensed contractor prepared and filed, is reasonably obtainable by you. And as covered above, any report a licensed Arkansas lead firm handed you sits in your possession — so if you have ever had the property inspected, screened, assessed, or abated, that report is squarely within the federal records duty.

Keep the signed disclosure for no less than three years from the commencement of the leasing period. 40 CFR 745.113(c)(1) puts it precisely: “The lessor, and any agent, shall retain a copy of the completed attachment or lease contract containing the information required under paragraph (b) of this section for no less than 3 years from the commencement of the leasing period.”

Note two details most summaries lose. The clock runs from the commencement of the leasing period, not from the signature date and not from the disclosure date. And the duty falls on the agent as well as the lessor — if a management company handled the letting, it has its own retention obligation, and “the agent has it” is not an answer if the agent has since binned it.

Subsection (c)(2) adds a limit that is worth quoting exactly, because it is routinely over-read: “This recordkeeping requirement is not intended to place any limitations on civil suits under the Act, or to otherwise affect a lessee’s or purchaser’s rights under the civil penalty provisions of 42 U.S.C. 4852d(b)(3).”

Electronic disclosure and signature are generally permitted. The E-SIGN Act, 15 U.S.C. 7001, gives an electronic signature and an electronic record the same legal effect as paper ones, subject to the Act’s consumer-consent conditions. Nothing in 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart F requires ink on paper. That covers the large Arkansas management companies running everything through a portal. What follows below are the E-SIGN consent conditions themselves; we are not restating any EPA-specific electronic-delivery guidance, because we did not verify one.

The conditions are where people slip. Give the tenant a clear statement of their right to receive paper documents. Explain how to withdraw consent and what happens if they do. Explain how to access and retain the electronic records. And obtain consent in a way that demonstrates the tenant can actually access the materials in the format you are sending. A link buried in a portal is not delivery, and a tenant who cannot open the pamphlet has not received it. The three-year retention rule applies identically to the electronic record.

The leasing disclosure and the renovation rule are two different obligations, and complying with one does nothing for the other. The EPA Renovation, Repair and Painting rule lives at 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart E — a different subpart from the disclosure rule at Subpart F.

In outline: a renovation that disturbs painted surfaces in a pre-1978 unit requires lead-safe work practices performed by a certified firm, and occupants must receive lead hazard information before work begins. We are deliberately not restating the RRP rule’s notice window, thresholds, or exclusions from memory here — we found competing pages stating the notice timing backwards, and the RRP rule has its own definitions and exceptions that deserve a primary read rather than a paraphrase. If you are planning work, read Subpart E itself or ask a certified firm.

The Arkansas layer sits directly on top of this. As set out above, the Arkansas Lead-Based Paint-Hazard Act of 2011 (A.C.A. 20-27-2501 et seq.) and the ADH Rules Pertaining to Lead-Based Paint Activities (20 CAR Part 130) govern who may perform lead-based paint activities — inspection, risk assessment, and abatement — in target housing, and they require that such work be done by a licensed consultant or contractor and certified individuals. If you hire a licensed firm, the licensing burden is theirs. The point for a landlord is simply that hiring an uncertified handyman to “sand it down” in a pre-1978 Arkansas rental can breach the federal work-practice rule and the state certification regime at once, and neither has anything to do with the disclosure you already gave the tenant.

Two separate exposures follow a missed disclosure, and Arkansas adds nothing to either.

The tenant’s private action

42 U.S.C. 4852d(b)(3) makes any person who knowingly violates the section jointly and severally liable to the purchaser or lessee in an amount equal to three times the amount of damages incurred by that individual. 40 CFR 745.118(c) restates it in the same terms. Then 4852d(b)(4), mirrored at 745.118(d), lets the court award court costs to the party commencing the action, together with reasonable attorney fees and any expert witness fees, where that party prevails. Treble damages plus fees is the part that turns a paperwork failure into litigation worth bringing.

Government civil penalties

40 CFR 745.118(a) subjects a knowing failure to comply to civil monetary penalties under 42 U.S.C. 3545 and 24 CFR part 30, and 745.118(e) makes failure to comply with 745.107, 745.110, 745.113, or 745.115 a violation of 42 U.S.C. 4852d(b)(5) and of TSCA section 409. Under 745.118(f), violators may face civil and criminal sanctions under TSCA section 16. The Secretary can also seek an injunction under 745.118(b).

Why we do not print a dollar figure here

Because any figure we printed would be wrong within a year. Federal civil monetary penalties are adjusted for inflation every year under the schedule at 40 CFR 19.4, so the operative amount is whatever that table says on the day of the violation — not what a form site typed once and left there.

Here is the trap that makes this concrete. 40 CFR 745.118(f) still carries, on its face, a per-violation ceiling drawn from the TSCA section 16 text as it stood in 1997. That un-adjusted number is still sitting in the published rule, and it is emphatically not what EPA assesses today — the 19.4 table has moved every year since. A reader who quotes the figure printed in 745.118(f), or the one the earlier version of this page carried, will be quoting a number that has been superseded many times over. That is exactly why we print no federal civil-penalty dollar figure here, not even to debunk one: a number on a page gets lifted and repeated, stripped of the caveat that made it honest. Go to the current 40 CFR 19.4 table. Do not trust a penalty number on any page, including this one.

No. A missing lead paint disclosure does not cancel the lease. EPA is explicit that the rule does not cancel leasing or sales contracts. The tenancy remains valid and enforceable; the tenant does not acquire a right to walk away merely because the form was never delivered.

What non-disclosure does is open the two exposures above — the government penalty track and the private treble-damages track. Those are serious enough without inventing a contract remedy that the rule does not create. If you discover mid-tenancy that you never delivered the disclosure, the answer is to deliver it now, document it, and get advice; it is not to assume the lease has evaporated.

One adjacent provision worth knowing: 40 CFR 745.119 states that nothing in the subpart relieves a seller, lessor, or agent from responsibility for compliance with State or local laws, ordinances, codes, or regulations governing notice or disclosure of known lead-based paint or hazards. That is the clause that would pull in a state lead law — and in Arkansas there is none for it to pull in. It matters anyway, because it means a local Arkansas ordinance could in principle add a notice duty. We found no such statewide requirement, and we did not attempt to audit every municipal code in the state; if you operate in a city with its own housing-code regime, a call to local code enforcement is a cheap way to close that gap.

In most states a tenant with deteriorated lead paint can also lean on a state warranty of habitability. Arkansas is the state where that back-up is thinnest. Arkansas’s landlord-tenant framework has long been the most landlord-favourable in the country, and the Arkansas Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 2007 (A.C.A. 18-17-101 et seq.) does not contain the broad implied-warranty-of-habitability repair mandate that most states’ acts carry. The practical consequence for lead is that the federal disclosure duty on this page is not one layer among several — it is doing most of the work.

We are deliberately not reciting the current contours of Arkansas’s state repair and minimum-condition rules here, because that body of law has been amended in recent years and deserves a primary read rather than a paraphrase from memory. For the state-law picture — what an Arkansas landlord must and must not do about the condition of a unit — see our Arkansas habitability laws guide and the Arkansas landlord-tenant laws hub. What matters for this page is the boundary: whatever the state condition rules require, they are separate from, and never a substitute for, the federal lead disclosure.

Be clear about what disclosure does and does not do. Telling a tenant “there is deteriorating lead paint in the window wells” discharges your federal disclosure duty completely and does nothing whatever about the deteriorating paint. Disclosure is not a shield: it discloses a hazard, it does not cure one. Deteriorated paint in a pre-1978 unit is a condition problem, governed by the lease and by the federal Renovation, Repair and Painting rule when the paint is disturbed, entirely separately from whatever you disclosed.

The practical connection is real but indirect: deteriorated paint in a pre-1978 unit is a condition problem, and a condition problem in an Arkansas rental is a habitability question under the general repair duty, entirely separately from whatever you disclosed. Disclosure is not a shield. Telling a tenant “there is deteriorating lead paint in the window wells” discharges your federal disclosure duty completely and does nothing whatever about the deteriorating paint. Our Arkansas habitability laws guide covers the condition-based duties, and the Arkansas landlord-tenant laws hub covers the chapter as a whole.

Skipping the disclosure on a pre-1978 unit

The single most common violation. A pre-1978 Arkansas rental let without a signed lead paint disclosure exposes the landlord to federal civil penalties and to a tenant’s private action for treble damages plus attorney fees. Arkansas’s older housing stock means this is not a rare edge case here.

Delivering at signing instead of before

The duty is discharged before the tenant is obligated (745.107(a)). Handing the form across the table as the tenant signs, or dropping it in the move-in packet, is late — and late is the same violation as never.

Printing a 10-day inspection line on a lease disclosure

It does not belong there. 745.113(b) has no inspection item. A waiver line for a right the tenant never had is a document you will struggle to explain.

Using the sales lead warning statement

The sales paragraph at 745.113(a)(1) opens “Every purchaser of any interest in residential real property…” and is not the lease text. If your form mentions purchasers, you have the wrong version.

Treating a studio as exempt when a child under six lives there

Since the 13 January 2025 amendment (89 FR 89416), “or any 0-bedroom dwelling” carries the same child-under-six condition as the elderly-and-disabled limb at 745.103. A studio, efficiency, or single rented room is target housing when a child under six resides or is expected, and it needs the disclosure. Older charts that still call studios categorically exempt are describing the pre-2025 rule.

Assuming a renovation reset the build date

It did not. Original construction before 1978 is the test. A 1962 Arkansas house stripped to the studs in 2001 is still target housing.

Wrong build-year assumption

“It looks eighties” is not evidence. Pull the county assessor record, the certificate of occupancy, or the permit file. Guessing high is a violation; guessing low costs you a form you did not owe.

Forgetting the pamphlet

A separate duty under 745.107(a)(1). A perfect form without the pamphlet is still a violation — and the tenant’s signature affirming receipt makes it worse.

Marking “no records” without checking the file

If a licensed Arkansas lead firm ever inspected or abated at the property, you hold the report — and a report in your possession is a record available to the lessor under 745.107(a)(4). Look before you tick.

Forgetting the records for the rest of the building

745.107(a)(4) expressly includes records regarding common areas. Building-wide evaluations reach every tenant in a pre-1978 building.

Pre-ticking the tenant’s or agent’s acknowledgments

Items (c), (d), and (e) are statements by the lessee and the agent. Filling them in for them destroys their evidentiary value and states something false.

Verbal or implied disclosure

“I told them the place was old” is not a disclosure. The rule wants an attachment to or within the lease, with signatures and dates.

Failing to disclose to every lessee

Where several tenants sign, all must receive the disclosure and pamphlet, and all must sign. One signature on a multi-tenant lease does not cover the others.

Confusing the Arkansas Lead-Based Paint-Hazard Act with a disclosure duty

It is a contractor certification regime (A.C.A. 20-27-2501 et seq.). It tells you who may perform lead-based paint activities, not what to tell a tenant. Believing Arkansas has a state disclosure form sends you looking for a filing that does not exist.

Doing your own abatement on a rental

The Arkansas Lead-Based Paint-Hazard Act requires lead-based paint activities in target housing to be performed by a licensed firm and certified individuals. Picking up a scraper yourself in a pre-1978 rental can pull you into that certification regime. The homeowner exemption is for your own residence, not a rental.

The right to the disclosure before being obligated

A prospective tenant of a pre-1978 Arkansas rental is entitled to the completed disclosure and the lessor’s knowledge statement before becoming obligated under the lease (745.107(a)) — not at move-in.

The right to the EPA pamphlet

An independent entitlement under 745.107(a)(1) and 15 U.S.C. 2696. A tenant who signed an acknowledgment of receipt but never got the pamphlet has a real grievance.

The right to the lessor’s records — including common areas

Every report available to the lessor, including building-wide evaluations covering common areas (745.107(a)(4)). “Available” includes reasonably obtainable, not merely in-hand.

The right to triple damages plus fees

42 U.S.C. 4852d(b)(3) gives a tenant a private action against a knowing violator for three times the damages incurred, and (b)(4) allows court costs, reasonable attorney fees, and expert witness fees to a prevailing party.

The right to report to EPA or HUD

Enforcement does not depend on a lawsuit. Either agency can act on a complaint, and 745.118 sets out the civil, injunctive, and criminal machinery behind it.

The right to a habitable unit

Independent of disclosure. Deteriorated paint is a condition problem, and the Arkansas landlord’s general repair duty operates whatever the disclosure said.

What Arkansas tenants do not have

A 10-day inspection right — that belongs to purchasers (745.110(a)). A right to demand the landlord test for lead — 745.107(a) expressly implies no positive obligation to evaluate. A right to void the lease for non-disclosure — the rule does not cancel contracts. Being straight about the limits is part of being useful about the rights.