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.

Watch: California Sublease Agreement explained

▶ Watch overview

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 the tenant is acting inconsistently with a lease they say is already over. California courts treat that kind of conduct as capable of waiving the forfeiture; it is a fact question, argued on what the landlord knew and when, and it is not something the statute resolves on its face.

What follows is practical. The evidence that decides a waiver argument is created before the argument starts. Dated rent receipts, the written consent request, any reply, and any message showing the landlord knew who was living there are what the question turns on. Keep them from day one, whichever side of it you are on. This is also why the generator above records the consent status and the date on the face of the PDF rather than leaving it to memory.

Yes — and the statute says so expressly, which is worth knowing because most pages assert it without a citation. The closing sentence of § 1161(3) reads: “A tenant may take proceedings, similar to those prescribed in this chapter, to obtain possession of the premises let to a subtenant or held by a servant, employee, agent, or licensee, in case of that person’s unlawful detention of the premises underlet to or held by that person.”

So you are the landlord in that relationship and you use the same machinery the owner would use against you. A subtenant who stops paying gets a three-day notice to pay rent or quit under § 1161(2); a subtenant who breaks a term of the sublease gets the perform-or-quit notice under § 1161(3). If they do not go, the case is an unlawful detainer in the same court. You cannot change the locks, remove their belongings or shut off utilities.

Two California-specific wrinkles are worth knowing before you start. First, § 1161(3) requires a notice about a sublet to be served on the subtenant in actual occupation as well as the tenant — which cuts both ways: it is how you may learn the owner is moving against your tenancy, and it is a step you must not skip when you are the one serving. Second, your own tenancy is the ceiling on theirs: if the master lease ends, the sublease ends with it, because you cannot grant more than you hold.

This is the half of the topic most sublease pages skip, and Code of Civil Procedure § 1161 answers more of it than people expect — because the statute keeps naming the subtenant separately from the tenant.

They must be served, not merely told

Paragraph (3) requires that where there is a subtenant in actual occupation of the premises, the three-day notice be served “also, upon the subtenant”. A subtenant is not a guest of the tenancy in the statute’s eyes; they are a party who gets their own notice.

They can save the tenancy themselves

Within that window the covenant may be performed by the tenant, by the subtenant in actual occupation, by a mortgagee of the term, or by any other person interested in its continuance — and doing so saves the lease “from forfeiture”. A subtenant who learns of a notice is not a bystander waiting on their sublessor.

But their tenancy is never larger than the one it hangs from

A sublease is carved out of the master lease, so it cannot outlast it. If the head tenancy ends — by forfeiture, by expiry, or because the sublessor leaves — the sublease ends with it. That is the structural risk of taking a sublet rather than a direct tenancy, and it is why a subtenant should ask to see both the master lease and the landlord’s written consent before paying anything.

Written or not, an occupant paying rent has a tenancy

Plenty of subleases are informal. That does not leave the occupant with nothing: someone in possession who pays rent has a tenancy the law recognises, and possession is recovered through the courts rather than by changing locks. What an unwritten arrangement really costs is evidence — what the rent was, what the term was, what the deposit covered. The document the generator above produces is worth most to the person with the least power in the arrangement.

These three get used interchangeably in conversation and mean different things on paper.

Sublease

You stay on the master lease and grant a nested tenancy to someone else, for part or all of the remaining term. You collect rent from the subtenant and you keep paying the owner. If the subtenant stops paying or damages the property, the owner looks to you. This is the arrangement the generator above documents.

Assignment

You transfer the whole of your remaining interest and step out. The new tenant deals with the owner directly. Owners are usually far more reluctant to agree to an assignment than to a sublease, because it substitutes a new party into their contract, and an assignment almost always needs the owner’s active participation rather than mere permission.

Replacement or additional roommate

Here the new person joins the owner’s lease and becomes a co-tenant. Nobody is subletting. This is often the cleanest option where the owner is willing, because it puts everyone in one contract, and in some rent-controlled cities it is treated more favourably than a sublet. A co-tenant addendum is the document for that, not a sublease.

Two payment relationships now exist and they should never be blended. You owe the owner under the master lease. The subtenant owes you under the sublease. If the subtenant pays late, your obligation to the owner is unchanged — which is the single strongest argument for screening a subtenant as carefully as any landlord would.

On deposits, California’s residential rule is Civil Code § 1950.5, and it was amended as recently as 2025. Subdivision (c)(1) caps security at one month’s rent in addition to first month’s rent. Subdivision (c)(5)(A) allows two months’ rent where the landlord meets both conditions: the landlord is a natural person or a limited liability company in which all members are natural persons, and the landlord owns no more than two residential rental properties collectively including no more than four dwelling units offered for rent. That two-month allowance does not apply where the prospective tenant is a service member.

Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and Santa Monica each operate a rent stabilisation ordinance, and Civil Code § 1946.2(i)(1)(A) expressly defers to a local just-cause ordinance adopted on or before September 1, 2019 — where one exists, the local ordinance applies instead of the state rule.

We have not read those ordinances, so we are not going to characterise what they say. What we can tell you is where to look: Los Angeles Municipal Code § 151.09 (the RSO’s grounds for eviction) and the San Francisco Rent Ordinance § 37.9, which is where that city’s replacement-roommate rules sit. Read the section, or call the rent board, before you advertise the room. The state-law analysis above is the floor, not the whole answer.

Two documents save more arguments than any clause you can draft. The first is a written move-in and move-out checklist, completed together and backed with dated photographs, so the condition of the room at handover is a matter of record rather than recollection. The second is a proper rental application with the subtenant’s written consent to be screened, so you are choosing on evidence rather than on impressions.

Because you are the landlord in this relationship, the ordinary landlord discipline applies to you: verify identity and income, contact the previous landlord, and keep the file. If the sublease goes wrong, the owner will not distinguish between your subtenant’s conduct and your own.

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.