Free California Roommate Agreement

A roommate agreement is a contract between the roommates. The landlord is not a party to it and it does not change the lease. In California that limit has become sharper, because as of 1 January 2026 the security-deposit rules were rewritten in a way that makes a purely internal split unworkable at the last step. Civ. Code § 1950.5(h)(1)(C) now makes the default a single cheque payable to all adult tenants. Everything else a roommate agreement does — rooms, rent shares, guests, chores, exit terms — still works exactly as you would expect. The deposit is the part that needs a different approach here.

Fill in the fields below and the generator produces a clean, dated PDF that every roommate can sign 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 Roommate Agreement explained

▶ Watch overview

A roommate agreement records what the people living together have agreed: who has which room, how the rent and the deposit are split, how the shared costs work, and what a departing roommate owes the others. None of that binds the landlord. Each tenant named on the lease remains answerable for the whole rent, and California’s general obligation rules do not soften that — Civ. Code § 1431’s default presumption is that an obligation of several people is joint, and the phrase “joint and several” appears nowhere in the 315,077 characters of the chapter governing residential hiring. What the agreement gives you is the other half: § 1432 gives a co-obligor who pays more than their share a right of contribution against the others, and this document is what proves what that share was.

• Who is named as a tenant on the lease, and who is living there without signing
• Each roommate’s share of the rent, and who pays the landlord
• The deposit allocation percentages, in the language § 1950.5 uses
• Whether a § 1950.5(h)(1)(C) allocation agreement has been signed by the landlord
• Each roommate’s forwarding address and preferred delivery method for the refund
• What happens if a roommate terminates under § 1946.7 and the rent does not fall
• That no forfeiture or re-letting fee applies to a departing roommate
• Guests, quiet hours, smoking, pets and cleaning
• The notice a departing roommate gives the others, and who approves a replacement
• That the agreement binds the roommates only and does not bind the landlord

• Writing a deposit split and stopping there. Since 1 January 2026 the default is one cheque payable to all adult tenants. Without an allocation agreement signed by the landlord and every adult tenant, the split cannot be executed.
• Penalising a roommate who leaves under § 1946.7. It is inoperative against them, and § 1946.7(k) exposes a landlord who enforces such a clause to statutory damages.
• Assuming the rent drops when a victim leaves. Section 1946.7(g) expressly does not relieve the other tenants of their obligations.
• Quoting a “two per bedroom plus one” occupancy rule. No primary source for it was found. Searching the whole of the chapter on hiring of real property for “per bedroom”, “occupancy standard” and “maximum number” returns nothing — that negative is scoped to that chapter, not to the whole Code.
• Believing a guest becomes a tenant after thirty days. There is no such general rule in California; § 1940.1’s thirty days is specific to residential hotels.

Civil Code § 1950.5 was amended by Stats. 2025, ch. 340, and the change goes directly to how roommates get their money back. Subdivision (h)(1)(C) now sets the default: the disposition of the security deposit is made by one check payable to all adult tenants, with the itemised statement delivered or mailed to whichever of them the landlord selects.

For a single tenant this is administrative. For four people who split a deposit unevenly two years ago, it is the whole problem. A single instrument payable to four people requires all four to endorse it. If one has moved to another state, stopped answering messages, or disagrees about damage, nobody gets paid.

The statute anticipates this and names the way out. The parties may instead make a written mutual agreement — between the landlord and all adult tenants — setting out how any remaining portion of the security will be returned, with the allocation percentages, together with each tenant’s chosen delivery method and forwarding address. Three things about that are worth noticing. It has to include the landlord, so it is not something the roommates can do alone. It has to include every adult tenant. And it speaks in percentages, which is why this page suggests recording percentages rather than only dollar figures.

There is one automatic exception. Under clause (iii), a tenant who terminated under § 1946.7 may request that their portion be disbursed to them directly, outside the joint cheque. That is the only statutory route around the default that does not need everyone’s signature.

California landlord-tenant law does not answer this, which surprises people. The phrase “joint and several” does not appear anywhere in the chapter governing the hiring of dwellings. The answer comes from general obligation law instead, and Civ. Code § 1431’s default presumption is that an obligation of several people is joint. In practice a residential lease states the position expressly, and commonly states it as joint and several — so read the lease rather than assuming.

This matters more in California than almost anywhere, and this page cannot answer it. No statute in the landlord-tenant chapter searched for this page sets out a procedure for adding or replacing a roommate — so in the jurisdictions with rent control, the operative rule is municipal. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland and Berkeley are each widely reported to regulate roommate addition and replacement, and those ordinances were not read for this page.

If you are in one of those cities, or any other rent-controlled jurisdiction, check the local ordinance before relying on anything here about adding or swapping a roommate. The state-law points above — the deposit rule, § 1946.7, contribution under § 1432 — still apply; the add-and-remove procedure may not be a matter of state law at all.

One state-law point carries through regardless of the local rule. Civ. Code § 1432 gives a co-obligor who pays more than their share a right of contribution from the others. That right is only as good as the evidence of what the shares were, and a signed roommate agreement is exactly that evidence.

You will see “two per bedroom plus one” quoted as California law. This page does not repeat it, because no primary source was found for it. Searching the entire chapter on hiring of real property — 315,077 characters across 91 sections — returns zero hits for “per bedroom”, “occupancy standard”, “occupancy limit”, “persons per” and “maximum number”. Health and Safety Code § 17922 delegates the question to the state building standards and the Uniform Housing Code, which are regulations rather than statute and are not reproduced here.

So the honest position is that any numeric limit comes from the building and housing codes as adopted locally, not from landlord-tenant law, and this page does not state a number. If the count matters to your situation, that is where to look.

This is easy to miss. Civ. Code § 1946.2 provides statewide just-cause eviction protection once a tenant has occupied for the qualifying period, and subdivision (a) ties the analysis to occupancy and to when additional adult tenants were added. Adding people to the lease before an existing tenant has reached twenty-four months of occupancy can affect whether the household has that protection.

That is not a reason to keep a roommate off the lease — being off the lease has its own serious consequences, including having no claim to the deposit. It is a reason to understand the timing before making the change, and to ask the landlord what they intend to do about the tenancy start date.

California does not define “guest”. The word appears twenty-five times in the chapter and never once definitionally. There is also no general rule that a guest becomes a tenant after thirty days — the thirty-day figure people cite is from § 1940.1 and is specific to residential hotels.

What the chapter does say is broad. Section 1940(a) applies it to “all persons who hire dwelling units… including tenants, lessees, boarders, lodgers, and others, however denominated”. The phrase “however denominated” is the useful part: what someone is called matters less than what is actually happening. If a person is paying to live there, the label on the arrangement will not decide it.

This document binds the people who sign it to each other, and no further. The landlord is not a party to it, is not bound by the shares in it, and does not have to deal with the roommates separately. Anyone named on the lease can still be pursued for the entire rent. The one place California now requires the landlord to be brought in is the deposit allocation, which is exactly why this page treats that as a separate step rather than something the roommates can settle among themselves.

A roommate agreement is a private contract, so most of what it does is decided by the roommates rather than by statute. The parts that state law does reach are the ones that involve the landlord — and the biggest of those is the deposit. Our guide to California security deposit laws sets out what the landlord may hold and when it has to come back, which is the money the roommates are dividing between themselves.

The other place state law bites is non-payment. An internal agreement about shares does not change what the landlord may do if the total rent is short, and California eviction notice laws explain the notices and timelines that follow — which reach everyone named on the lease, not only the roommate who fell behind.

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

Published by Tenant Screening Background Check

Established 2004 · 20+ Years · All U.S. States & Territories · Statute-Based · Attorney-Reviewed

A Private Eye Reports™ service trusted by landlords, property managers, and attorneys.