Free California Sublease Agreement

A sublease puts a new occupant — the subtenant — into a rental while the original tenant, the sublessor, stays on the hook to the landlord for rent and for damage. In California the question everyone asks first is whether the landlord has to agree. The answer is not in the Civil Code chapter most websites cite: Civil Code § 1995.010 says that chapter applies to leases “for other than residential purposes.” For a home, the consent rule is whatever the master lease says — and the consequences of getting it wrong are set by the unlawful detainer statute.

Fill in the fields below and the generator produces a clean, dated PDF you can print, sign and hand to your subtenant. Nothing is stored and there is no charge. Fields you leave blank print as a dash so you can complete them by hand. The consent section is deliberately prominent, because that is the term that decides whether the sublease is secure or fragile.

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A sublease creates a second, nested tenancy. The original tenant keeps the master lease and becomes a landlord to the subtenant; the owner’s relationship stays with the original tenant. That is what separates a sublease from an assignment, where the original tenant hands the whole remaining term over and steps out, and from a replacement roommate, where a new person is added to the existing lease and deals with the owner directly. The three are not interchangeable, and the paperwork differs. If you sign a sublease when what you actually did was assign the lease, or add a roommate to the owner’s agreement, the document will not describe the arrangement you are living in — which is exactly when disputes become expensive.

• The full address including unit or room, and whether the sublease covers the entire premises or one room with shared areas.
• The names and contact details of the sublessor, the subtenant and the master landlord.
• The master lease dates and the sublease dates — a sublease cannot outlast the master lease it hangs from.
• The rent payable to the sublessor, the due date, and the method of payment.
• The security deposit amount, what it may be used for, and when it will be returned.
• Which utilities are included in the rent and which the subtenant pays separately.
• Furnishing, parking, storage, smoking, pets and guests — the day-to-day terms that cause most friction.
• The consent position: obtained, requested, not required, or not yet requested, with the date and the master lease clause number.
• An acknowledgement that the subtenant has received the master lease and is bound by it.
• Signature lines for the sublessor, the subtenant and, where consent is given, the owner.

• Relying on § 1995.260. The chapter it sits in applies by its own terms only to leases “for other than residential purposes”. It gives a residential subtenant no “reasonableness” argument at all.
• Counting the three days on a calendar — or assuming the same count everywhere. § 1161(3) excludes Saturdays, Sundays and other judicial holidays, so a perform-or-quit notice that looks expired often is not. § 1161(4) does not carry that wording; check which paragraph you are under.
• Not serving the subtenant. § 1161(3) requires the notice to go to the subtenant in actual occupation as well as the tenant — and within that window the subtenant may cure and save the lease.
• Assuming § 1950.5 covers your sublease deposit. The section never mentions sublandlords. If the terms are not in your document, they may not be anywhere.
• Writing a sublease that outlasts the master lease. A sublease is carved out of the tenancy above it and falls with it.
• Ignoring a pre-September-2019 local ordinance. Where one exists, § 1946.2(i)(1)(A) hands the just-cause question to the city, not the state.

Short answer: read your lease, because that is what decides it. The Civil Code chapter that supplies a reasonableness standard for consent — §§ 1995.010 to 1995.340, the chapter quoted on sublease page after sublease page — applies by its own terms only to non-residential leases. So it is not the source of a residential right to sublet, and it is not the source of any duty on a residential landlord to be reasonable. For a home, the consent rule is the lease.

So the two rules that page after page attributes to residential subletting — § 1995.210(b), that a tenant may transfer freely unless the lease restricts it, and § 1995.260, that a consent requirement with no stated standard carries an implied term that consent may not be unreasonably withheld — are rules for non-residential property: shops, offices, warehouses, farmland, ground leases. They are good law. They are simply not about your flat.

What follows from that is practical rather than dramatic. If your lease says you may not sublet without the owner’s written consent, that is the rule, and there is no statutory reasonableness standard sitting behind it to rescue you. If your lease is silent, you are in the territory of general contract and property principles rather than a clean statutory answer, which is precisely why asking in writing is worth so much: it converts an uncertain legal position into a documented one.

This is where California law is specific, and where the detail matters more than most pages admit. Code of Civil Procedure § 1161 sets out the grounds for an unlawful detainer, and subletting appears in two different paragraphs that lead to two different notices.

Paragraph (3): three days to perform or quit — and you can cure

Paragraph (3) covers a tenant who continues in possession “after a neglect or failure to perform other conditions or covenants of the lease … including any covenant not to assign or sublet”. The landlord must serve three days’ notice, excluding Saturdays and Sundays and other judicial holidays, requiring performance or possession — and, where there is a subtenant in actual occupation, the notice must be served on the subtenant as well.

The important half is what comes next: within that window the tenant, any subtenant in actual occupation of the premises, a mortgagee of the term or any other person interested in its continuance may perform the covenant “and thereby save the lease from forfeiture”. In plain terms, ending the unauthorised sublease inside the window can preserve the tenancy.

But paragraph (3) does not stop there, and the sentence most pages never quote is the one that matters most here:

So the statute expressly contemplates covenants that cannot be performed after they have been broken, and removes the perform-or-quit requirement for them. That is the bridge to paragraph (4). Whether ending an unauthorised sublet counts as a covenant that “cannot afterward be performed” is the live question — the statute poses it rather than answering it, and we are not going to pretend the text settles it either way.

Paragraph (4): three days to quit — no cure offered

Paragraph (4) is harsher. It says that a tenant or subtenant “assigning or subletting … contrary to the conditions or covenants of the lease” “thereby terminates the lease”, and the landlord is entitled to possession “upon service of three days’ notice to quit”. There is no perform-or-quit alternative written into it.

Where AB 1482 just cause applies — and an unresolved tension worth knowing

Civil Code § 1946.2 lists “assigning or subletting the premises in violation of the tenant’s lease” among the at-fault just causes for termination, and § 1946.2(c) requires that, before issuing a notice to terminate for a just cause that is a curable lease violation, the owner “shall first give notice of the violation to the tenant with an opportunity to cure” under paragraph (3). Only “if the violation is not cured within the time period set forth in the notice” may a three-day notice to quit without an opportunity to cure follow.

Section 1946.2 does not cover everything, and the section says so itself. Its exclusions include property already subject to a local just-cause ordinance adopted on or before September 1, 2019 — in which case the local ordinance applies instead — transient and tourist hotel occupancy, and mobilehome homeowners. Check whether the tenancy is inside or outside § 1946.2 before relying on the cure requirement.

This is the question tenants ask once the sublet is already running, and almost no form page answers it. Paragraph (4) says an unauthorised sublet “thereby terminates the lease” — but a landlord who knows about the sublease and goes on accepting rent from