Free Chicago Residential Lease Agreement

▶ Watch walk-through

A configurable Chicago residential lease agreement that generates a signable multi-page PDF. Built to the Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance, Municipal Code chapter 5-12 — with the real coverage test, the two sections that survive an exclusion, and the annual deposit interest rate stated as a mechanism rather than a number that quietly goes stale.

Chicago RLTO 5-12 Fair Notice Free PDF 2026 Edition

A Chicago residential lease agreement is governed by two layers of law at once, and the city layer is the one that decides most disputes. Underneath sits Illinois statute — a dozen separate Acts, no single landlord-tenant code, and a genuinely low floor. On top sits the Chicago Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance at Municipal Code chapter 5-12, which is far stricter: it sets a two-day entry notice where Illinois sets none, forces the deposit into a separate account and prices a slip at twice the deposit, caps the late fee, bans nine lease clauses outright, and requires the City’s own summary to be physically attached to the lease. But none of that is automatic. Everything on this page depends first on a coverage test — Section 5-12-020 pulls whole categories of Chicago housing out of the ordinance, and then pulls two sections back in for some of them. Get that test wrong and every other answer on the lease is wrong too, which is why the form below asks it before it asks anything else.

Complete the fields below to generate a Chicago residential lease agreement as a signable multi-page PDF. The coverage question comes first because the ordinance itself works that way, and the generated document states its own coverage position on the face of the lease rather than assuming it. Every field is written into the PDF, and the lease cites the controlling ordinance section at each point. Before handing over keys, run proper tenant screening — and note that in Cook County the screening process itself is regulated, which is covered further down. Pair the signed lease with a Chicago move-in / move-out checklist, which is the single best defence against the two-times-the-deposit exposure that Section 5-12-080 creates.

Almost all of them, and the exceptions are narrower than the internet believes. Section 5-12-010 states the rule in one sentence: the chapter “applies to, regulates and determines rights, obligations and remedies under every rental agreement for a dwelling unit located within the City of Chicago, regardless of where the agreement is made, subject only to the limitations contained in Section 5-12-020.” Two things follow immediately. The test is where the unit is, not where the lease was signed or where the landlord lives. And the ordinance reaches subsidised housing: the same section says it applies specifically to rental agreements for units operated under United States and State of Illinois subsidy programmes, including Chicago Housing Authority and Illinois Housing Development Authority programmes, so far as it does not directly conflict with the statutes or regulations governing those programmes.

Section 5-12-020 then lists the exclusions, and opens with an anti-evasion clause that does real work: the listed units are outside the chapter “unless the rental agreement thereof is created to avoid the application of this chapter.” The exclusions are:

• (a) Dwelling units in owner-occupied premises containing six units or fewer — the famous one, and the one most often overstated. Read the rest of the subsection below.
• (b) Units in hotels, motels, inns, bed-and-breakfast establishments, roominghouses and boardinghouses — but only until the unit has been occupied by a tenant for thirty-two or more continuous days and the tenant pays a monthly rent, excluding any period of wrongful occupancy contrary to agreement with an owner. Past that point the ordinance applies in full.
• (c) Institutional and student housing — housing accommodations in a hospital, convent, monastery, extended care facility, asylum or not-for-profit home for the aged, a temporary overnight or transitional shelter, or a dormitory owned and operated by an elementary school, high school or institution of higher learning; student housing where the housing agreement is between the student and an institution of higher learning or where the institution exercises control or supervision; and student housing owned and operated by a tax-exempt organisation affiliated with an institution of higher learning.
• (d) Purchase-contract occupancies — a unit occupied by a purchaser under a real estate purchase contract before title transfers, or by a seller after title transfers.
• (e) Employee quarters — a unit occupied by an employee of a landlord whose right to occupancy is conditional upon employment in or about the premises.
• (f) Co-op proprietary leases — a dwelling unit in a cooperative occupied by a holder of a proprietary lease.

There is no condominium exclusion. This is worth saying flatly, because the City’s own plain-English summary lists “owner occupied co-ops and condominiums” among the units the ordinance does not cover, and Chicago condo owners read that as meaning a rented condo sits outside the RLTO. The ordinance text does not say that. Subsection (f) covers a person living in their own co-op unit under a proprietary lease — an owner, not a tenant. Nothing in Section 5-12-020 excludes a condominium unit rented to a tenant. So a Chicago condo let on an ordinary lease is inside the ordinance in full, unless the building happens to be an owner-occupied building of six units or fewer, or unless the co-op limb applies. Suburban Cook County does have a narrow single-condominium exclusion, and importing it into a Chicago lease is one of the more expensive mistakes on this list.

Two further points on the hotel and rooming-house limb, both in the ordinance text and both routinely dropped. First, the exclusion is a clock, not a category: it expires at thirty-two continuous days with monthly rent. Second, the section expressly forbids gaming that clock — no landlord may bring an action to recover possession of such a unit, or avoid renting monthly, in order to avoid the application of the chapter.

Two sections survive an exclusion, and this is the part the Chicago SERP gets wrong most consistently. Section 5-12-020(a) does not simply switch the ordinance off for owner-occupied small buildings. Its own words are: dwelling units in owner-occupied premises containing six units or fewer are not governed by the chapter, “provided, however, that Sections 5-12-130(j) and 5-12-160 shall apply to every rented dwelling unit in such premises within the City of Chicago.”

That means the owner of a Chicago two-flat or three-flat who lives in one unit is bound by exactly the same Fair Notice periods as a large management company — thirty, sixty or one hundred and twenty days written notice before terminating a periodic tenancy, declining to renew, or raising the rent — and by exactly the same prohibition on lockouts and utility interruptions, with its fine and its two-months-rent civil exposure. Several ranking Chicago pages state the opposite, telling small owner-occupant landlords that the notice rules do not reach them. They do.

Subsection (b) does the same thing for the hotel and rooming-house limb, and only for one section: “Notwithstanding the above, the prohibition against interruption of tenant occupancy set forth in Section 5-12-160 shall apply to every rented dwelling unit in such buildings within the City of Chicago.” So a rooming house on day five of a stay is outside the deposit rules and the Fair Notice rules, but the operator still may not change the lock, block the door or cut the heat to force someone out.

The carve-backs are asymmetric on purpose, and you have to hold both in mind: the six-unit exclusion preserves two sections; the hotel exclusion preserves one. The other four exclusions preserve none. The form above records which of these applies, and the generated lease states the resulting position rather than leaving the reader to guess.

Finally, Section 5-12-190 — Rights and remedies under other laws — is the bridge back to the state layer: “to the extent that this chapter provides no right or remedy in a circumstance, the rights and remedies available to landlords and tenants under the laws of the State of Illinois or other local ordinance shall remain applicable.” An exclusion from the RLTO is not an exclusion from Illinois law. The Illinois Security Deposit Return Act, the radon and flood disclosures, the Safer Homes summary and the Eviction Article all continue to apply to a unit the ordinance never reaches.

Section 5-12-170 requires two separate documents, and getting the version wrong is the cheapest way to hand a tenant a termination right. The section directs the Commissioner of Housing to prepare a summary of chapter 5-12 describing the rights, obligations and remedies of landlords and tenants, and to make it available for public inspection and copying. A copy “shall be attached to each written rental agreement when any such agreement is initially offered to any tenant or prospective tenant by or on behalf of a landlord and whether such agreement is for a new rental or a renewal thereof.” Where the agreement is oral, the landlord must give the tenant a copy.

The second document is the one most often forgotten. The same section says the Commissioner shall also, after the City Comptroller has announced the rate of interest on security deposits on the first business day of the year, prepare a separate summary describing the rights, obligations and remedies with respect to security deposits, including the new interest rate as well as the rate for each of the prior two years. Two summaries, prepared at different times, both owed.

The ordinance also dictates a specific sentence the summary must contain, which is why Chicago leases carry a porch-safety paragraph that reads oddly out of context. Section 5-12-170 requires the language: “The porch or deck of this building should be designed for a live load of up to 100 pounds, per square foot and is safe only for its intended use. Protect your safety. Do not overload the porch or deck. If you have questions about porch or deck safety, call the City of Chicago non-emergency number, 3-1-1.”

The remedy for getting it wrong. If the landlord acts in violation of the section the tenant may terminate the rental agreement by written notice specifying a termination date no later than thirty days from the date of the notice, and a tenant who establishes the violation in a civil proceeding recovers one hundred dollars in damages. That is a small sum on its own, but it comes with a walk-away right in the middle of a lease term, which is not small at all.

Which version is current. No ranking Chicago page answers this, though it is the practical question. The Department of Housing publishes the summary at the City’s RLTO page in English and Spanish; that page states it is “Effective as of May 1st 2024”, and the PDF’s own cover reads “Approved by the City of Chicago: July 2020” and “Summary Revised: December 2023”. So the operative document is the December 2023 revision, effective 1 May 2024. The July 2020 approval date matters: that is the Fair Notice revision. A landlord attaching a summary printed before mid-2020 — and a great many photocopied packets in circulation are older than that — is attaching a document that describes notice periods which no longer exist. Download a fresh copy from the City each time you paper a new tenancy, and check the cover date. Our Chicago RLTO summary disclosure form records the acknowledgment of receipt.

In a separate, federally insured, interest-bearing account at a financial institution located in Illinois — and Section 5-12-080(a)(1) adds that the deposit and the interest on it remain the property of the tenant, may not be commingled with the landlord’s assets, and are not subject to the claims of any creditor of the landlord or of the landlord’s successors, including a foreclosing mortgagee or a trustee in bankruptcy. That last clause is the reason the rule exists: the money has to be traceable when the building changes hands under stress.

Four operational rules sit underneath it, all in subsection (a):

• The combined-payment window. A landlord may accept the first month’s rent and the deposit in one check or one electronic funds transfer and put them in one account, provided that within five business days the deposit is transferred into a separate complying account.
• The bank must be named in the lease. The name and address of the financial institution where the deposit will be held must be “clearly and conspicuously disclosed in the written rental agreement signed by the tenant.” If there is no written agreement, the landlord must notify the tenant in writing within fourteen days of receiving the deposit. If the deposit moves institutions during the tenancy, written notice of the new institution is due within fourteen days of the transfer.
• Excess interest is not commingling. A landlord is not treated as commingling merely because the account holds money above the total of the deposits plus the interest due on them.
• The receipt is due at the moment of receipt. Subsection (b) requires a receipt showing the amount, the name of the person receiving it, the landlord’s name where an agent receives it, the date received and a description of the dwelling unit, signed by the person receiving the deposit. Failure entitles the tenant to immediate return of the deposit. Where the deposit is paid by electronic funds transfer the landlord may instead give an electronic receipt showing the date, the amount, a description of the unit and an electronic or digital signature as defined in 5 ILCS 175/5-105.

There is no cap. Chicago sets no maximum on the amount of a residential security deposit, and neither does Illinois. A ranking Chicago template advertises “deposit limits (1.5-2 months)” for an RLTO lease; that one-and-a-half-month figure is the suburban Cook County ordinance, which does not govern a unit inside the City. The same page prints the Chicago heat season as October 1 to June 1; it is September 15 to June 1. What Chicago regulates is not how much you may take but what you must do with it, and the penalty is severe: under Section 5-12-080(f)(1), a failure to comply with any provision of Section 5-12-080(a) through (e) entitles the tenant to two times the security deposit plus interest, and does not preclude other damages under the chapter.

On a change of ownership, subsection (e) makes the successor landlord liable to the tenant for the deposit including statutory interest and any prepaid rent, and requires the successor to notify the tenant in writing within fourteen days of the transfer, at the last known address, with the successor’s name, business address and the business telephone number of the successor’s agent. The transferor stays jointly and severally liable unless and until it both transfers the money and gives the tenant that written notice within ten days of the transfer.

It is a number the City recalculates every year, so the right thing to record is the mechanism, not the figure. Section 5-12-081 sets it out precisely. During December of each year the City Comptroller reviews the status of banks within the city and the interest rates on savings accounts, insured money market accounts and six-month certificates of deposit at commercial banks located within the city. On the first business day of each year the Comptroller announces those three rates, as of the last business day of the prior month, at the commercial bank having the most branches located within the city. The rates for money market accounts and certificates of deposit are based on the minimum deposits for those investments. The Comptroller then calculates and announces the average of the three rates, and that average is the rate of interest on security deposits under rental agreements gover