Free Chicago Residential Lease Agreement

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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 governed by the chapter and “made or renewed after the most recent announcement.”

That closing phrase is the operative one. The rate is fixed by reference to when the agreement was made or renewed, not by reference to the year in which the interest happens to accrue. A lease signed in one year keeps that year’s rate; a renewal signed the following January picks up the new one. Section 5-12-080(c) then requires a landlord who holds a security deposit or prepaid rent for more than six months to pay interest accruing from the beginning date of the rental term stated in the agreement, at the Section 5-12-081 rate for the year the agreement was entered into, and to pay it within thirty days after the end of each twelve-month rental period, in cash or as a credit against rent due. Note that prepaid rent earns interest too, which a great many Chicago leases overlook.

Publication is itself a duty. Section 5-12-082 requires the Comptroller to cause the new rate to be published for five consecutive business days in two or more newspapers of general circulation in the city, requires the City to publish a free pamphlet describing deposit rights including the new rate and the rate for each of the prior two years, and requires distribution through public service announcements to radio and television outlets broadcasting in the city. So the rate is not an obscure figure a landlord has to hunt for; the City is obliged to push it out.

The current figure, with its year attached. For the period 1 January 2026 through 31 December 2026 the Department of Housing publishes the rate as 0.01 percent, stating that it is based on the average of the rates as of 31 December 2025 at Chase Bank, the commercial bank having the most branches located in the City of Chicago. The City’s published table shows the rate has been 0.01 percent every year since 2015, and above 1% only in the years before the financial crisis. That stability is exactly why a stale hard-coded figure in a lease template can survive unnoticed for a decade and then be wrong at the worst moment. This generator prints the mechanism and a blank the parties fill in, so a signed Chicago lease cannot silently carry last decade’s rate. Look the figure up at the City’s Department of Housing page each January, and use our Chicago security deposit interest rate notice to paper the annual payment.

Within forty-five days of the date the tenant vacates — or within seven days where the tenancy ended after fire or casualty damage. Section 5-12-080(d) sets both clocks. The seven-day clock runs from the date the tenant gives notice of termination under Section 5-12-110(g), which is the fire-and-casualty remedy, and it is the shortest deposit deadline in Illinois law by a wide margin.

The landlord may deduct two things and only two: unpaid rent which has not been validly withheld or deducted under state or federal law or local ordinance, and a reasonable amount necessary to repair damage caused to the premises by the tenant or a person under the tenant’s control or on the premises with the tenant’s consent, reasonable wear and tear excluded.

Where damage is deducted, a second clock starts. The landlord must deliver or mail to the tenant’s last known address within thirty days an itemized statement of the damages allegedly caused and the estimated or actual cost of repairing or replacing each item, with copies of the paid receipts attached. If an estimate is given rather than an actual cost, the landlord must furnish paid receipts — or a certification of actual costs where the work was done by the landlord’s own employees — within thirty days from the date the estimate statement was furnished.

Read the two together and the practical sequence is: itemize with receipts inside thirty days, return the balance inside forty-five. Missing either is a failure to comply with Section 5-12-080(a) through (e), and the sanction is the same two times the deposit plus interest. This is why an agreed, photographed, signed condition record at move-in is worth more in Chicago than almost anywhere else: the multiplier applies to procedural failures, not just to dishonest ones.

Thirty, sixty or one hundred and twenty days, depending on how long the tenancy has run, and the duty is on the landlord alone. Section 5-12-130(j), added by the 2020 Fair Notice amendments, requires the landlord to notify the tenant in writing before the stated termination date of the rental agreement of an intent to do any of three things: terminate a periodic tenancy, decline to renew a fixed-term agreement, or increase the rental rate. The tiers are:

Three details decide most Fair Notice arguments. First, the right to stay is measured from when notice is actually given, not from the termination date in the lease: the subsection says the tenant may remain “regardless of the termination date specified in the notice or in an existing rental agreement.” A landlord who serves late does not simply push the move-out back by the missing days; the tenant gets a fresh statutory window running from the day the notice landed.

Second, the terms during that occupancy are frozen at the month immediately preceding the notice — with a specific anti-abuse rule for concessions: if rent was waived or abated in the preceding month or months as part of the original rental agreement, the rate during the statutory window is the rate established on the last date a full rent payment was made. In plain terms, a landlord cannot use a burned-off free-month promotion to argue that the frozen rate is the promotional one.

Third, subsection (j) has a precondition. It applies only where the landlord has not terminated under 5-12-130(a) for nonpayment, (b) for material noncompliance by the tenant, or (d) for disturbing the neighbours’ peaceful enjoyment, and where the unit has not been deemed abandoned under (e). A tenant in the eviction process for one of those grounds does not also get a Fair Notice period.

Separately, Section 5-12-130(i) limits how early a landlord may push for a decision the other way: no tenant may be required to renew a rental agreement more than ninety days before the termination date, and a landlord who violates that owes one month’s rent or actual damages, whichever is greater. Between (i) and (j) there is a defined window in which the renewal conversation is supposed to happen. Our Chicago 30/60/120-day termination notice and Chicago rent increase notice handle the service side.

A myth worth naming. The deepest ranking Chicago page describes these periods as obligations on “either side” and says that after six months “either side must give at least sixty days’ notice.” Section 5-12-130(j) imposes the duty on the landlord only. A Chicago tenant’s own notice obligation comes from the lease and from the Illinois Eviction Article, not from this subsection, and a tenant who gives thirty days on a two-year tenancy has not breached 5-12-130(j), because 5-12-130(j) does not speak to them.

A bounded South Side pilot that supersedes the ordinary Fair Notice periods with longer ones, added on 25 September 2025 and self-repealing no later than 31 January 2029. Section 5-12-135 is new, it appears on no ranking Chicago page, and inside its boundary it changes the answer to the previous section entirely. Subsection (b) is explicit that the requirements “supersede the notice requirements in Section 5-12-130(j)” within the bounded area for the duration of the pilot.

The boundary, in the ordinance’s own words, is the area bounded by 60th Street to the north, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive to the west, South Chicago Avenue to the southwest, 71st Street to the south, and South DuSable Lake Shore Drive to the east.

The notice periods under subsection (e), for any periodic residential lease within the pilot area beginning on or after the section’s effective date, are at least one hundred and eighty days for a tenancy lasting more than three years, at least one hundred and twenty days for a tenancy of not less than twelve months but not more than three years, and at least ninety days for a tenancy of one year or less — in each case before the stated termination date, and in each case covering termination of a periodic tenancy, non-renewal of a fixed term, and a rent increase.

Two codification quirks to know before you rely on the section. The first is cosmetic but confusing: subsection (g) refers to the “South Shore Expanded Fair Notice Pilot Program” while the section itself is titled Jackson Park, and the code carries an editor’s note saying the intended language is likely “Jackson Park” and that future legislation will correct it if needed. Cite the section number and the substance, not the programme name.

The second is substantive and easy to miss. The notice tiers in subsection (e) and the right-to-stay tiers in subsection (f) do not use the same brackets. Subsection (e) works in tiers of more than three years, twelve months to three years, and one year or less. Subsection (f) bars eviction for up to one hundred and eighty days for a year-to-year lease or one lasting longer than a year, one hundred and twenty days for a lease of not less than one month and under a year, and thirty days for a lease of one month or less. A two-year tenancy therefore sits in the middle tier for the notice it is owed but in the top tier for the protection it gets if the notice never comes. Read both subsections; do not assume they mirror.

The pilot expires three years after its effective date and no later than 31 January 2029, and subsection (d) says that on expiry the section is automatically repealed without further action by the City Council. So this is a dated provision with a known end, and anyone drafting a long Chicago lease inside that boundary should diarise it.

No less than two days, delivered directly to each dwelling unit. Section 5-12-050 is the section every Illinois template quotes and mislabels — it is the source of the “two-day entry notice” that circulates as though it were Illinois law. It is not. Illinois has no statewide landlord-entry statute at all. Two days is Chicago.

The section first lists the purposes for which a tenant may not unreasonably withhold consent to entry: necessary or agreed repairs, decorations, alterations or improvements; necessary or agreed services; inspections authorized or required by a government agency; exhibiting the unit to prospective or actual purchasers, mortgagees, workmen or contractors; exhibiting the unit to prospective tenants sixty days or less before the existing agreement expires; practical necessity where repairs or maintenance elsewhere in the building unexpectedly require access; determining the tenant’s compliance with the rental agreement; and emergency.

It then sets the notice rule. Except where access is authorized by the practical-necessity limb or the emergency limb, the landlord must give notice of intent to enter of no less than two days, provided directly to each dwelling unit by mail, telephone, written notice to the unit, or other reasonable means designed in good faith to give the tenant notice. Where access is required for repair work to common facilities or other apartments, a general notice may be given to all potentially affected tenants that entry may be required.

The emergency limb is not a free pass. Where the landlord enters without notice under the practical-necessity or emergency limb, the ordinance still requires the landlord to “give the tenant notice of such entry within two days after such entry.” The notice obligation moves; it does not disappear. Most Chicago leases in circulation say nothing about after-the-fact notice at all.

Hours. The landlord may enter only at reasonable times except in case of an emergency, and an entry between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m., or at any other time expressly requested by the tenant, is presumed reasonable. Note that this is a presumption, not a permission: an 8:00 p.m. entry can still be unreasonable on its facts. The section also states flatly that the landlord shall not abuse the right of access or use it to harass the tenant.

The remedies run both ways. Under Section 5-12-060, if the landlord makes an unlawful entry, or a lawful entry in an unreasonable manner, or makes repeated unreasonable demands for entry that are otherwise lawful but have the effect of harassing the tenant, the tenant may obtain injunctive relief or terminate the agreement on the Section 5-12-110(a) notice, and may recover not more than one month’s rent or twice the damage sustained, whichever is greater. If the tenant refuses lawful access, the landlord may obtain injunctive relief to compel access or terminate under Section 5-12-130(b), and in either case may recover damages.

The deepest ranking Chicago page publishes a sample entry clause telling landlords to give “at least 24 hours’ notice.” That clause is below the ordinance floor and unenforceable to the extent it purports to reduce the tenant’s right. A Chicago lease may promise more notice than two days; it may not promise less. Our Illinois notice to enter form handles the service.

Ten dollars per month on the first five hundred dollars of monthly rent, plus 5% per month of any amount above five hundred dollars. It is one formula with two limbs, and both limbs apply to the same lease at the same time. Section 5-12-140(h) frames it as a prohibition on the lease rather than a cap on the charge: no rental agreement may provide that a tenant shall pay a charge, fee or penalty for the late payment of rent in excess of that amount.

Worked through: on rent of four hundred dollars the ceiling is ten dollars, because there is no excess over five hundred. On rent of one thousand dollars the ceiling is ten dollars plus 5% of five hundred dollars. On rent of two thousand dollars it is ten dollars plus 5% of one thousand five hundred dollars. Reading the section as an either/or — which is how most Chicago guidance presents it — overstates the cap at low rents and understates it at high ones.

Section 5-12-140(i) is the sibling nobody covers. It makes it an equally prohibited provision for a lease to provide that, if the tenant pays rent before a specified date or within a specified period in the month, the tenant receives a discount or reduction in rent in excess of the same ceiling. The drafting logic is obvious once you see it: a fifty-dollar “early payment discount” on a nine-hundred-dollar rent is economically identical to a fifty-dollar late fee, and the ordinance treats it identically. Chicago leases that carry a generous prompt-payment incentive are frequently in breach without anyone noticing.

Chicago sets no statutory grace period. If the lease wants one, the lease must create it — and note that a grace period and the five-day nonpayment notice are different things. The five days in Section 5-12-130(a) run after a written notice of intention to terminate, not from the rent due date.

Nine of them, listed in Section 5-12-140, and no ranking Chicago page covers the section at all. This is the largest single gap on the Chicago results, because these are the clauses that ordinary lease templates carry by default. Except as otherwise specifically provided by the chapter, no rental agreement may provide that the landlord or tenant:

• (a) Agrees to waive or forgo rights, remedies or obligations provided under chapter 5-12.
• (b) Authorizes any person to confess judgment on a claim arising out of the rental agreement.
• (c) Agrees to the limitation of any liability of the landlord or tenant arising under law.
• (d) Agrees to waive any written termination of tenancy notice, or the manner of service of it, provided under state law or the ordinance.
• (e) Agrees to waive the right of any party to a trial by jury.
• (f) Agrees that in the event of a lawsuit arising out of the tenancy the tenant will pay the landlord’s attorney’s fees, except as provided for by court rules, statute, or ordinance.
• (g) Agrees that either party may cancel or terminate the agreement at a different time or within a shorter time period than the other party, unless that provision is disclosed in a separate written notice.
• (h) Agrees to a late payment charge above the ten dollars plus 5% ceiling.
• (i) Agrees to an early payment discount above the same ceiling.

The sanction has two tiers. A prohibited provision included in a rental agreement is simply unenforceable. The tenant may recover actual damages sustained because of the enforcement of a prohibited provision. And — the part that changes drafting behaviour — if the landlord attempts to enforce a prohibited provision, the tenant may recover two months’ rent. Attempting counts. A demand letter relying on a void clause is not a costless probe.

Subsection (g) deserves a note because it is the only one with a cure built in. Asymmetric termination rights are not banned outright; they are banned unless disclosed in a separate written notice. If a Chicago lease genuinely needs one side to be able to exit on shorter notice, the fix is a standalone disclosure, not burying it in the boilerplate.

No — and this is the sharpest place where Chicago diverges from Illinois. Illinois statute neither requires nor prohibits a lease attorney-fee clause, so an Illinois lease can carry a reciprocal prevailing-party clause as a matter of contract. Chicago Municipal Code 5-12-140(f) makes a clause requiring the tenant to pay the landlord’s fees a prohibited provision, and attempting to enforce it costs the landlord two months’ rent under the same section. A drafter who starts from a state-level Illinois form and moves it into the City will import exactly the wrong default. This form therefore offers no attorney-fee field, and the generator emits no fee-shifting clause.

The carve-out in subsection (f) — “except as provided for by court rules, statute, or ordinance” — is not a licence to draft around the ban. It preserves fee awards that arise by law, and the principal one is Section 5-12-180: “except in cases of forcible entry and detainer actions, the prevailing plaintiff in any action arising out of a landlord’s or tenant’s application of the rights or remedies made available in this ordinance shall be entitled to all court costs and reasonable attorney’s fees,” with a proviso that nothing in the section precludes a fee award in an eviction action in accordance with applicable law or as expressly provided in the ordinance.

Read that carefully, because its shape is unusual. It runs to the prevailing plaintiff, not to the prevailing party — so it rewards whoever brought the action and won, and it does not hand a defendant landlord a fee award for successfully defending. And it switches off in the eviction proceeding, which is the landlord’s commonest forum. Elsewhere in the ordinance fee entitlements appear individually: Section 5-12-130(b) allows the landlord reasonable attorney’s fees where the tenant’s noncompliance is wilful, and Section 5-12-150 gives a tenant fees on a retaliation claim.

The net effect for a Chicago landlord is that the lease is not the place fees come from. Every route to a fee award is statutory, conditional, and mostly pointed the other way — and the one clause that would change that is void, with a two-months-rent price on trying it.

Five days’ written notice, and then a one-time right to cure that runs much later than most landlords expect. Section 5-12-130(a) provides that if all or any portion of rent is unpaid when due and the tenant fails to pay within five days after written notice of the landlord’s intention to terminate if rent is not paid, the landlord may terminate.

Then comes the Fair Notice addition that changed Chicago eviction practice. At any time prior to the issuance of any order of possession or eviction order under Article IX of the Illinois Code of Civil Procedure, the tenant has a one-time right to cure the nonpayment by paying the unpaid rent duly owed from the date of the notice of termination to the date of payment, together with all filing fees and costs paid by the landlord and all fees and costs expended for service of process — but not including attorney’s fees. If the tenant cures, the case is dismissed on the motion of either party.

Three consequences follow. First, the cure window is not five days; it is five days to avoid termination, and then all the way to judgment to avoid eviction, once. Second, the landlord recovers filing and service costs on that cure but expressly not attorney’s fees, so a landlord who litigates hard and is then cured out absorbs the legal spend. Third — and this protects the landlord — the ordinance provides that if the landlord does not provide a total amount due, the tenant is obliged to pay only the rent due from the notice to the date of judgment. Serving a notice without a figure narrows what the cure has to cover.

The right is one-time. The City’s own summary explains the consequence plainly: a tenant who uses the provision and later receives a second written notice of nonpayment has only the five days, and no further opportunity to pay back rent to force a dismissal.

Accepting rent waives the termination. Section 5-12-130(g) provides that, so long as the tenant is not in the process of exercising the one-time cure right, a landlord who accepts the rent due knowing there is a default in payment thereby waives the right to terminate the rental agreement for that breach. This is the trap that ends more Chicago nonpayment cases than any argument on the merits: a partial payment banked by an on-site office while the case is pending can extinguish the ground it was filed on.

For other breaches, Chicago’s ten-day notice is a genuine cure-or-quit notice — and here the city is more generous to tenants than the state. Section 5-12-130(b) lets the landlord deliver written notice specifying the acts or omissions and stating that the agreement terminates on a date not less than ten days after receipt, “unless the breach is remedied by the tenant within that period of time.” Illinois’s own ten-day notice at 735 ILCS 5/9-210 is unconditional and gives no statutory right to cure at all. Same number of days, opposite legal character. Use our Illinois 5-day pay rent or quit notice for the service mechanics, and read the Chicago cure right on top of it.

Section 5-12-130(c) gives the landlord a self-help repair route for tenant-caused breaches of Section 5-12-040 other than the peaceful-enjoyment limb: if the tenant fails to comply as promptly as conditions permit in an emergency, or within fourteen days of a written notice specifying the breach otherwise, the landlord may enter and have the necessary work done in the manner required by law, and is entitled to reimbursement of the cost. Section 5-12-130(d) allows an injunction or a ten-day termination where the tenant disturbs the neighbours’ peaceful enjoyment within sixty days after a subsection (b) notice.

Chicago gives the tenant a graduated set of remedies that Illinois statute does not, and the repair-and-deduct cap runs in the opposite direction to the state one. The foundation is Section 5-12-070, which is short and broad: the landlord shall maintain the premises in compliance with all applicable provisions of the municipal code and shall promptly make any and all repairs necessary to fulfil that obligation. Chicago therefore has the general habitability duty Illinois statute lacks, and it is measured against the municipal code itself. Section 5-12-110 then opens with a long non-exhaustive list of what counts as material noncompliance — structural integrity, exits, smoke alarms and sprinklers, elevators, plumbing fixtures, heat and hot water, locks and peepholes, screens, porches and stairways, extermination, refuse, light and ventilation, and the catch-all failure to maintain the unit and common areas in a fit and habitable condition.

• Major defects — 5-12-110(a). Where material noncompliance renders the premises not reasonably fit and habitable, the tenant may deliver written notice specifying the acts or omissions and stating that the agreement terminates on a date not less than fourteen days after receipt unless the noncompliance is remedied within the period stated. If it is not remedied, the agreement terminates and the tenant must deliver possession within thirty days after that period expires. If possession is not delivered, the notice is deemed withdrawn and the lease continues in force — a real trap for a tenant who serves the notice and then stays. On termination the landlord returns all prepaid rent, security and interest.
• Minor defects — 5-12-110(c). Where the reasonable cost of compliance does not exceed the greater of five hundred dollars or one-half of the monthly rent, and provided the cost does not exceed one month’s rent, the tenant may recover damages or give written notice of intent to correct the condition at the landlord’s expense. If the landlord fails to correct within fourteen days, or as promptly as conditions require in an emergency, the tenant may have the work done in a workmanlike manner and in compliance with existing law and building regulations and, after submitting a paid bill from an appropriate tradesman or supplier, deduct the amount from rent — capped at the statutory limit and at the price customarily charged.
• Rent withholding — 5-12-110(d). The tenant may give written notice of an intention to withhold from the monthly rent an amount that reasonably reflects the reduced value of the premises, and if the landlord fails to correct within fourteen days, may deduct that amount for as long as the failure continues.
• Essential services — 5-12-110(f). Where the noncompliance is an immediate danger to health and safety, or the landlord fails to supply heat, running water, hot water, electricity, gas or plumbing, the tenant may after written notice procure the service and deduct its cost, or recover damages based on the reduction in fair rental value, or procure substitute housing rent-free and recover its reasonable value up to a month’s rent per month of noncompliance. In addition the tenant may withhold an amount reflecting the reduced value if the landlord fails to correct within twenty-four hours, or terminate if the failure persists more than seventy-two hours. Neither the withholding nor the termination is available where the failure is due to the utility provider’s inability to supply service. A tenant proceeding under (f) may not also proceed under (c) or (d).
• Fire or casualty — 5-12-110(g). The tenant may vacate immediately and give written notice within fourteen days of an intention to terminate, in which case the agreement terminates as of the date of the fire; or vacate the unusable part with a proportionate rent reduction; or, where the landlord promised or began repairs but fails to carry them out diligently and within a reasonable time, give written notice within fourteen days of becoming aware of that failure. This is the notice that triggers the seven-day deposit return.

Note the direction of the cap. Chicago’s minor-defect remedy is the greater of five hundred dollars or one-half of the monthly rent, subject to an overall ceiling of one month’s rent. The Illinois Residential Tenants’ Right to Repair Act at 765 ILCS 742/5 uses the lesser of the same two figures. The two run in opposite directions, and the Chicago tenant’s remedy is the larger one. Guidance that describes a Chicago repair-and-deduct limit using the state figure understates it for every tenant paying more than one thousand dollars a month.

In each case the tenant loses the remedy if the condition was caused by the deliberate or negligent act or omission of the tenant, a member of the tenant’s family, or another person on the premises with the tenant’s consent — and where the repair affects facilities shared by more than one unit, the tenant must notify the other affected tenants and cause the work to be done with the least practical inconvenience.

Chicago adds its own set on top of the Illinois set, and two of the Chicago items are physical attachments rather than clauses. Working through the ordinance in section order:

• Identification of owner and agents — 5-12-090. In writing at or before the commencement of the tenancy: the name, address and telephone number of the owner or person authorized to manage the premises, and of a person authorized to act for the owner for service of process and for receiving and receipting for notices and demands. The information must be kept current, and the duty runs against any successor landlord, owner or manager. The sanction is unusual and severe: a person who enters into a rental agreement and fails to comply becomes an agent of the landlord for service of process, for receiving notices and demands, and for performing the landlord’s obligations under the ordinance and the agreement. The tenant may also terminate on the 5-12-110(a) notice and, if the landlord still fails to comply after that written notice, recover one month’s rent or actual damages, whichever is greater.
• Notice of conditions affecting habitability — 5-12-100. Before the tenant initially enters into or renews: any code violations cited by the City during the previous twelve months for the unit and the common areas, plus notice of the pendency of any code enforcement litigation or administrative hearing proceeding under Section 14A-3-301.2.2 affecting the unit or common area, giving the case number or hearing identification number and a listing of the violations cited; and any notice of intent by the City or a utility provider to terminate water, gas, electrical or other utility service, stating the type of service, the intended termination date and whether it affects the unit, the common areas or both. The utility limb is a continuing obligation throughout the tenancy, not a one-off at signing. A violation carries the 5-12-090 remedies.
• Bed bug brochure — 5-12-101. For any rental agreement entered into or renewed after the 2013 amendatory ordinance, the landlord must, before entering into or renewing it, provide the informational brochure on bed bug prevention and treatment prepared by the department of health. A citation note: Section 5-12-101 points to Section 7-28-860 for the brochure, but in the current code 7-28-860 is Sale of secondhand bedding; the brochure duty sits at 7-28-870, Public information, which requires the commissioner to prepare and post a brochure stating that the pests are a public nuisance, how to detect them, how to prevent their spread, that tenants must contact their landlord as soon as practicable, and where to get more information. The landlord’s duty is unaffected — hand over the health department brochure — but the cross-reference does not resolve.
• Foreclosure disclosure — 5-12-095. Within seven days of being served a foreclosure complaint as defined in 735 ILCS 5/15-1504, the owner or landlord must disclose in writing to all tenants that a foreclosure action has been filed, and to any third party with a consistent pattern and practice of paying rent on a tenant’s behalf. Before a tenant initially enters into a rental agreement, the owner or landlord must also disclose in writing that they are named in a foreclosure complaint. The disclosure must give the court, case name and case number and include the prescribed paragraph beginning “This is not a notice to vacate the premise.” Failure lets the tenant terminate on notice of no more than thirty days and recover two hundred dollars in damages, in addition to any other remedy.
• Heating cost disclosure — 5-16-010. A building or dwelling unit owner or agent may not execute a lease, contract to lease, or accept money on an application, for a unit in which utility service for heat is individually metered to the unit and the tenant is directly responsible to the utility company for the cost of heating, without disclosing in writing that the cost of heating is the tenant’s responsibility and the annual cost of service from the utility providing the primary source of heat, based on energy consumption during the previous twelve months. The tenant must execute a receipt acknowledging the disclosures. Two exceptions apply: a sitting tenant continuing an occupancy in which they were already directly responsible for heat, and condominium, cooperative or other units where the primary heat source is provided centrally and energy costs are shared and billed indirectly on a basis not related to individual usage, such as floor space. Section 5-16-030 lets the figure come from an online source or, on written request, from the utility at no direct cost within two weeks, and says the information stays valid for disclosure purposes for six months.
• Recycling education — 11-5-140. Titled Education of tenants — Required, this section obliges each refuse collection customer to run an ongoing education programme for tenants, residents and occupants about its source-separated recycling programme, including flyers listing the materials that must be recycled, the materials that may not go in a recycling container, how to prepare materials, where the containers are, the hauler’s name and collection schedule, and a named contact. It is a lease-time delivery duty on its face: the flyer must be provided to tenants “at the time any lease, rental agreement or similar agreement… is signed, renewed or otherwise extended,” and written notice of any change to the programme is due within ten calendar days. The only exemption, at Section 11-5-100, is for a customer that backhauls all recyclable material or holds a certificate of exemption.

The Illinois layer still applies on top. Section 5-12-190 preserves it, and four state duties reach every Chicago lease: the Summary of Rights for Safer Homes, which since 1 January 2026 must be attached as the first page of every written residential lease and signed by each tenant at the bottom of every page; the radon disclosure to tenants at 420 ILCS 46/26, with its agency pamphlet, hazard records, prescribed form, ninety-day tenant testing window and termination right — and note that a widely cited Chicago guide still describes the Illinois radon duty as arising only where a test has shown a hazard, and tells landlords they are not required to give renters any informative pamphlet; that was the law before Public Act 103-298, which repealed Section 25 of the Act and replaced it with the broader duty at Section 26, so the IEMA pamphlet, the records and the prescribed form are now owed at application or before the lease is entered into; the flood hazard and flooding history disclosure at 765 ILCS 705/25, which must sit inside the written lease and be signed by both parties, with an extra ten-year history limb for a garden, basement or first-floor unit — a very large share of Chicago’s housing stock; and written smoke detector and carbon monoxide alarm information. Federal lead-based paint disclosure applies to any dwelling built before 1978, which is most of the city. Note that the City’s RLTO summary does not satisfy the Safer Homes requirement and the Safer Homes summary does not satisfy Section 5-12-170: they are different documents from different governments, and both are owed.

On lead specifically: Chicago has no lease-execution lead disclosure of its own beyond the federal one. Section 7-4-030 imposes a general duty on every owner of a dwelling or residential building to maintain it so as to prevent the existence of a lead hazard, and Section 7-4-065 requires a commercial establishment selling paint or paint-removal supplies to post a warning — a retailer duty, not a landlord one. The full Illinois disclosure set is covered on our Illinois lease page, and this page does not repeat it.

From 15 September of each year to 1 June of the succeeding year, at sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit by day and sixty-six by night — and the section everyone cites for it no longer exists. Every Chicago heat write-up on the results cites Municipal Code 13-196-410. Chapter 13-196 is RESERVED in the current Municipal Code of Chicago. The minimum requirements for existing buildings were recodified into Title 14X, and the heat duty is now 14X-8-802.2.2. The current code still carries a dangling cross-reference in its definitions — “Building, Existing. For definition see Chapter 13-196” — which is a codification artefact, not a live chapter. This is a city citation going stale through recodification rather than amendment, and it is invisible unless you open the chapter and find it empty.

The operative text: dwelling units and sleeping units to which heat is furnished from a heating plant used in common for more than one unit must be supplied with heat from 15 September to 1 June so that occupants may secure, with all windows and exterior doors closed, a minimum of sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit from 8:30 a.m. until 10:30 p.m. and sixty-six degrees Fahrenheit from 10:30 p.m. until 8:30 a.m., in all habitable spaces, toilet rooms and bathrooms. The section expressly does not prevent an owner disengaging heating equipment or engaging cooling equipment between those dates so long as the required minimum temperature is maintained.

The 2022 exception no ranking page carries. As amended 20 July 2022, the section adds: in buildings where the same facilities are used to provide both heating and cooling to the units, the minimum temperature is sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit at all hours between 15 September and 15 October prior to the first date when the nighttime outdoor temperature falls below forty-five degrees, and between 1 May and 1 June on or after the first date when the daytime outdoor temperature exceeds seventy-five degrees. For a Chicago high-rise on a two-pipe changeover system, that exception is the whole ballgame in the shoulder seasons, and it appears nowhere on the current Chicago search results.

A separate and often-confused duty sits at 14X-8-802.2: every dwelling unit and sleeping unit must have permanent heating equipment capable of maintaining sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit in all habitable spaces, toilet rooms and bathrooms when the outdoor temperature is minus seven degrees Fahrenheit — and neither cooking appliances, domestic water heating equipment nor portable space heaters may be used to provide the required heating capacity. Under 14X-8-802.2.1 the owner may require the occupant to secure the energy source at the occupant’s own expense, but that does not relieve the owner of responsibility for providing functioning heating equipment. So a tenant-metered unit still has an owner-side equipment duty; paying the gas bill does not transfer it.

Failure to provide heat is also material noncompliance for the purposes of Section 5-12-110, which is what puts the twenty-four-hour and seventy-two-hour essential-services clocks in play.

In some buildings, yes — a 2022 addition that no ranking Chicago page covers. Section 14X-8-803 sets capability requirements by building type. Nursing homes must have permanent cooling and dehumidification equipment capable of maintaining seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit and 50% relative humidity in all habitable spaces, toilet rooms and public corridors. Housing for older persons must have the same capability in all indoor common gathering spaces. And buildings of Group R occupancy containing more than one hundred dwelling or sleeping units, or that are high-rise buildings, must have it in at least one indoor common gathering space. Portable equipment could satisfy these requirements only before 1 May 2024.

The operating duty is the part that matters day to day. Under Section 14X-8-803.6, on days when the heat index exceeds eighty degrees Fahrenheit, the required cooling and dehumidification equipment must be operated to maintain safe indoor conditions for occupants — and where a cooling system is not available in each dwelling unit, an area provided with cooling must be accessible to each resident of the building. Section 14X-8-803.5 requires the equipment to be independent of the heating equipment or capable of switching from heating to cooling mode within one hour, which is the practical answer to the old “the boiler is on until May” problem. Section 14X-8-803.7 requires it to be properly installed and maintained in safe working condition.

For a large Chicago rental building this is a lease-drafting fact, not just a code fact: a lease that describes an air-conditioned common lounge as an amenity the landlord may withdraw at will is describing something the building code may require it to operate.

No. Section 5-12-120 is one of the shortest sections in the ordinance and one of the most commonly breached. Where the tenant terminates before the expiration date, other than for a cause authorized by the chapter, the landlord must make a good faith effort to re-rent the unit at a fair rental — defined as the rent charged for comparable dwelling units in the premises or in the same neighbourhood — and “shall accept a reasonable sublease proposed by the tenant without an assessment of additional fees or charges.”

A sublease fee, an assignment fee, a “lease break” administration charge or a re-letting fee in a Chicago lease is therefore contrary to the ordinance on its face, and because Section 5-12-140(a) voids any provision by which a party agrees to waive rights or remedies provided under the chapter, dressing it up as an agreed charge does not save it.

The accounting that follows is straightforward. If the landlord succeeds in re-renting at a fair rental, the tenant is liable only for the shortfall between the rent due from the date of premature termination to the end of the initial agreement and the fair rental actually received over the same period. If the landlord makes a good faith effort and is unsuccessful, the tenant is liable for the rent due for the period of the agreement, plus the landlord’s reasonable advertising costs. On an abandonment rather than a negotiated early exit, Section 5-12-130(e) adds reasonable redecoration costs to that list — a distinction worth noticing, because it is the only place in the chapter where walking away silently costs more than leaving properly.

Two sections, both with a two-months-rent floor on damages. Section 5-12-150 declares it against the public policy of the City for a landlord to take retaliatory action against a tenant, except for violation of a rental agreement or violation of a law or ordinance. A landlord may not knowingly terminate a tenancy, increase rent, decrease services, bring or threaten to bring a possession lawsuit, or refuse to renew a lease because the tenant has in good faith:

• complained of code violations applicable to the premises to a competent governmental agency, elected representative or public official charged with enforcement of a building, housing, health or similar code;
• complained of such a code violation or an illegal landlord practice to a community organization or the news media;
• sought the assistance of a community organization or the news media to remedy a code violation or illegal landlord practice;
• requested the landlord make repairs required by a building code, health ordinance, other regulation or the rental agreement;
• become a member of a tenants’ union or similar organization;
• testified in any court or administrative proceeding concerning the condition of the premises; or
• exercised any right or remedy provided by law.

The remedy: the tenant has a defence in any retaliatory action for possession, and is entitled to recover possession or terminate the agreement and, in either case, recover not more than two months’ rent or twice the damages sustained, whichever is greater, plus reasonable attorneys’ fees. On termination the landlord returns all security and interest recoverable under Section 5-12-080 and all prepaid rent. And there is a burden-shifting rule: evidence of protected tenant conduct within one year before the alleged act of retaliation creates a rebuttable presumption that the landlord’s conduct was retaliatory, though the presumption does not arise if the protected activity was initiated after the alleged act. The news-media limb is worth flagging because the parallel Illinois statute does not carry it.

Lockouts — Section 5-12-160. It is unlawful for a landlord, or anyone acting at the landlord’s direction, knowingly to oust or dispossess a tenant, or to threaten or attempt to, without authority of law: by plugging, changing, adding or removing a lock or latching device; blocking an entrance; removing a door or window; interfering with services including electricity, gas, hot or cold water, plumbing, heat or telephone; removing the tenant’s personal property; removing or incapacitating appliances or fixtures except to make necessary repairs; using or threatening force, violence or injury; or by any act rendering the unit or personal property in it inaccessible or uninhabitable. The exceptions are narrow: a sheriff’s eviction under Illinois law, distress for rent, temporary interference only as necessary for repairs or inspection as provided by law, and abandonment as defined in Section 5-12-130(e).

Enforcement is unusual in that the Chicago Police Department investigates complaints and determines whether a violation occurred. A person found guilty is fined not less than two hundred dollars nor more than five hundred dollars, and each day the violation occurs or continues is a separate offence. A tenant who establishes a violation in a civil proceeding recovers possession of the unit or the personal property and not more than two months’ rent or twice the actual damages, whichever is greater — and the civil remedy is available whether or not a fine has been imposed. Remember that this is one of the two sections that survives the owner-occupied six-unit exclusion, and the only one that survives the hotel and rooming-house exclusion.

Abandonment and abandoned property. Section 5-12-130(e) defines abandonment tightly: actual notice from the tenant of an intention not to return; or all persons entitled to occupy having been absent for twenty-one days (or one rental period where the agreement is for less than a month) and having removed their personal property and rent for that period being unpaid; or all persons entitled to occupy having been absent for thirty-two days and rent for that period being unpaid. Abandonment does not occur if a person entitled to occupancy gives written notice of an intention still to occupy and makes full payment of all amounts due. Section 5-12-130(f) then requires the landlord to leave abandoned property in the unit or remove and store it, and permits disposal after seven days — or immediately where the landlord reasonably believes the property is valueless, worth less than the cost of storage, or subject to spoilage. Treating an unpaid month as abandonment without checking all three limbs is how a lawful re-entry becomes an unlawful lockout.

A relocation-assistance regime for tenants of foreclosed rental property, at chapter 5-14, that no ranking Chicago lease page covers. Under Section 5-14-050 the owner of a foreclosed rental property must pay a one-time relocation assistance fee of ten thousand six hundred dollars to a qualified tenant, unless the owner negotiates in good faith for a new rental agreement lasting at least twelve months, offers the tenant such an agreement, and the tenant accepts in writing. For an unlawful hazardous unit or an unlawful conversion, the same fee is owed unless the owner offers, and the tenant accepts, a replacement rental unit — which may be in the same property or elsewhere.

The mechanics matter. The fee is payable by certified or cashier’s cheque no later than seven days after the tenant completely vacates. It is in addition to any deposit or other refund. It may be reduced only by rent due and payable before the unit was vacated, and the ordinance states expressly that the owner shall not retain any part of it for damage to the premises or any other breach. A tenant who rejects or fails to respond to a good faith offer of a new agreement within twenty-one days releases the owner from the offered agreement — but expressly does not lose the right to the relocation fee. The owner is relieved of the fee only where the tenant accepts a written agreement, or where the owner has obtained a judgment for possession.

Section 5-14-040 adds a notice regime with real teeth. No later than twenty-one days after becoming the owner of a foreclosed rental property, the owner must make a good faith effort to identify all occupants and serve a prescribed written notice — which itself recites the ten thousand six hundred dollar figure and tells the tenant they may reject an offer of a new agreement and still receive it — with the responsible party’s name, address and telephone number and the date of the notice, plus a Tenant Information Disclosure Form; and must post the same disclosures at the primary entrance. Service is by personal delivery, delivery to a resident aged thirteen or older, or first class or certified mail. The sanction in subsection (d) is the one that concentrates minds: an owner who fails to comply shall not collect rent due and owing from any occupant until the notices are served.

Section 5-14-050(f) awards a qualified tenant damages equal to two times the relocation assistance fee for each violation, Section 5-14-070 supports a private action recovering damages and reasonable attorney’s fees, and Section 5-14-080 makes any lease provision waiving rights under the chapter unenforceable. Section 5-14-030 excludes an owner who held the property before the chapter’s effective date, a bona fide third-party purchaser, certain receivers holding a Receiver’s Certificate, an owner who will occupy the unit as a principal residence, and a qualifying long-established affordable-housing not-for-profit.

One practical note on the figure: ten thousand six hundred dollars is written into the ordinance text, in both Section 5-14-050 and the prescribed notice at Section 5-14-040. Nothing in chapter 5-14 indexes it to inflation or requires an annual republication, so unlike the deposit interest rate it does not move on a calendar — only an amendment can change it. Check the current text before relying on it, but do not expect a January revision.

It binds every Chicago landlord, it comes from Cook County rather than the City, and it prescribes a two-step process that most Chicago application flows do not follow. The Just Housing Amendment sits in the Cook County Human Rights Ordinance, not in the county’s landlord-tenant ordinance, which is why it reaches inside the City limits when the county’s tenancy rules do not. The Cook County Commission on Human Rights has issued interpretive rules — Part 700, added 31 December 2019 and amended 9 December 2021 — and they are specific.

Before accepting an application fee, the housing provider must disclose the tenant selection criteria describing how an applicant will be evaluated; the applicant’s right to provide evidence demonstrating inaccuracies in their conviction history, or evidence of rehabilitation and other mitigating factors; and a copy of Part 700 or a link to the Commission’s website with its address, email address and phone number.

Step one is pre-qualification. No person may inquire about, consider, or require disclosure of covered criminal history — other than current sex offender registration under the specified subsections — before the pre-qualification process is complete and the provider has determined the applicant satisfies all other application criteria. Once that is done, the provider must notify the applicant that the first step has been satisfied and that a criminal background check will be performed or solicited.

Step two is the background check, and it is bounded. The provider may not consider any information related to criminal convictions more than three years old, or any covered criminal history as defined in the ordinance. Within five days of obtaining the check the provider must deliver a copy to the applicant, in person, by certified mail, or by electronic communication. The applicant then has five business days to produce evidence disputing the accuracy or relevance of information related to convictions from the last three years.

Only then may the provider conduct an individualized assessment of whether the applicant poses a demonstrable risk — defined as the likelihood of harm to other residents’ personal safety or serious damage to property, and, where the applicant has a disability, requiring objective evidence and a conclusion that the risk cannot be reduced or eliminated by a reasonable accommodation. The rules list the factors: the nature and severity of the offence and how recently it occurred, the nature of the sentencing, the number of convictions, time elapsed since the most recent, the applicant’s age at the time, evidence of rehabilitation, the applicant’s history as a tenant, and whether the conviction was related to a disability. An individualized assessment may be skipped only where there is a current sex offender registration requirement or a current child sex offender residency restriction.

Chicago also has its own fair housing chapter. Section 5-8-020 prohibits refusing to rent or lease, or discriminating in the terms, conditions or privileges of a rental, because of race, colour, sex, gender identity, age, religion, disability, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, marital status, parental status, military status or source of income, or because of actual or perceived association with such a person. Source of income is a Chicago protected class, so an advertisement or lease policy refusing a Housing Choice Voucher is unlawful in the City. Section 5-8-050 sets out narrow exemptions covering certain age-restricted housing, some religious-organisation housing, and restricting the rental of rooms to persons of one sex. Our Illinois tenant screening laws guide covers the state layer.

The county’s tenancy ordinance does not; its human rights ordinance does. This distinction confuses a lot of Chicago guidance, and it is worth being precise about because the two county instruments behave differently.

The Cook County Residential Tenant Landlord Ordinance carves Chicago out in its own scope section. Section 42-801(D) says the ordinance regulates all residential buildings and structures within the boundaries of Cook County, “excluding those cities, villages, and incorporated towns that maintain promulgated regulations that establish both the rights and obligations of both the tenant and the landlord in the rental of dwelling units” — and then specifies what such municipal regulations must contain to earn the exclusion: language defining and regulating the landlord-tenant relationship, policies protecting and promoting the public health, safety and welfare of tenants, and remedies under a rental agreement. Chicago’s RLTO is exactly that. Read alongside Section 5-12-010, which applies the RLTO to every rental agreement for a dwelling unit located within the City, the boundary is clean: inside the City, the RLTO governs.

Two county rules a Chicago landlord should therefore not import. The county caps a security deposit at one and a half times the monthly rent; Chicago has no cap at all. And Cook County Section 42-802(A)(7) excludes a single-family home or single condominium unit where it is the owner’s only leased residential unit, the owner or an immediate family member actually resided there for at least one month in the preceding twelve, and the owner personally manages it. Chicago’s Section 5-12-020 has no equivalent exclusion — which is the deeper reason a rented Chicago condo is inside the RLTO.

The Just Housing Amendment is the counter-example, and the reason to check which county ordinance a source is talking about. It amends the county Human Rights Ordinance, which contains no municipal carve-out of that kind, so it reaches Chicago landlords in full. A guide that says “the Cook County ordinance does not apply in Chicago” without saying which one is giving half an answer.

All of them that the ordinance does not displace — Section 5-12-190 says so expressly. A Chicago lease is not an ordinance-only document. The Illinois layer supplies things chapter 5-12 simply does not address, and this page deliberately does not restate the state law in depth; the Illinois residential lease agreement page does that. What a Chicago drafter needs to know is which state provisions still bite:

• The Summary of Rights for Safer Homes must be the first page of every written lease, new or renewal, and signed by each tenant on every page. This is a state duty and the City’s summary does not satisfy it.
• The radon disclosure to tenants and the flood hazard and flooding history disclosure are state duties with their own remedies, and the flood one must sit inside the lease document itself.
• The exculpatory-clause ban at 765 ILCS 705/1 voids any provision exempting the lessor from liability for injuries caused by the lessor’s negligence — and it overlaps with, rather than duplicates, Section 5-12-140(c).
• The Safe Homes Act gives a tenant under a credible imminent threat of domestic or sexual violence a lock-change right and a rent defence after vacating, and it may not be waived or modified in any lease.
• The Eviction Article at 735 ILCS 5 supplies the court procedure the ordinance’s cure right refers to, and the wilful-holdover double-damages rule at 735 ILCS 5/9-202.
• The utility Acts at 765 ILCS 735 and 740 supply the shared-meter disclosure regime and the 100% rent abatement for a landlord-caused shutoff, which sits alongside Section 5-12-160.
• The lock-rekey duty at 765 ILCS 705/15 applies only in counties over three million people — which today means Cook County alone, so it does reach Chicago.
• The reusable tenant screening report rule at 765 ILCS 705/30 bars an application screening fee where the applicant supplies a qualifying report, and it interacts directly with the Just Housing disclosure that must precede an application fee.

Where the two layers give different answers, the ordinance generally gives the tenant more, and Section 5-12-140(a) prevents the lease bargaining the difference away. Where they give the same answer by different routes — the thirty-day itemization and the deposit multiplier, for instance — a Chicago tenant can usually pick.

Two competing packages have been introduced at City Council and neither has passed, so neither is law. The Mayor and the Department of Housing introduced the Protecting Renters Ordinance in 2026 as a modernisation of the RLTO, and a group of aldermen introduced a competing package, the Fair and Accountable Illinois Rental ordinance, in July 2026. Press coverage of both reads, in places, as though the changes were already in force.

They are not. As at the verification date of this page, the Municipal Code of Chicago stands at supplement 2026 S-73, current through the Council Journal of 18 March 2026, and chapter 5-12 reads as set out above. A committee vote had not sent either package to the full Council. This page states the ordinance as codified, and if either package passes, the Fair Notice periods, the fee rules and possibly a just-cause standard will change and this page will need re-deriving from the enacted text rather than from coverage of a proposal.

The general lesson is the one this whole family of pages exists to make: introduced is not passed, passed is not enacted, and a well-sourced news article about a proposal is not a source for what a lease must say today.

• Treating the owner-occupied six-unit exclusion as switching the whole ordinance off. Section 5-12-020(a) keeps Fair Notice and the lockout ban alive for every rented unit in such a building.
• Assuming a rented condominium is exempt. There is no condominium exclusion in Section 5-12-020. The single-condo exclusion belongs to suburban Cook County.
• Reading the late fee cap as an either/or. It is ten dollars on the first five hundred dollars of rent plus 5% of the excess, in one formula.
• Offering a large early-payment discount. Section 5-12-140(i) subjects it to the same ceiling as a late fee.
• Charging a sublease, assignment or lease-break fee. Section 5-12-120 requires the landlord to accept a reasonable sublease without additional fees or charges.
• Carrying a tenant-pays-the-landlord’s-fees clause across from an Illinois template. Prohibited by 5-12-140(f), and two months’ rent for attempting to enforce it.
• Writing a twenty-four-hour entry notice. The floor is two days, and notice is still owed within two days after an emergency entry.
• Naming no bank in the lease. Section 5-12-080(a)(3) requires the institution’s name and address in the written agreement itself.
• Skipping the deposit receipt. Failure entitles the tenant to immediate return of the deposit, before any dispute about damage arises.
• Forgetting that prepaid rent earns interest too. Section 5-12-080(c) covers a deposit “or prepaid rent” held more than six months.
• Hard-coding the deposit interest rate. It is re-announced on the first business day of every year and binds agreements made or renewed after the announcement.
• Attaching an old RLTO summary. The current version is the December 2023 revision, effective 1 May 2024; anything pre-2020 predates the Fair Notice rules.
• Forgetting the second summary. Section 5-12-170 requires a separate security deposit summary carrying the year’s rate and the two prior years.
• Treating the Illinois Safer Homes summary and the City RLTO summary as interchangeable. Different governments, different documents, both owed.
• Citing 13-196-410 for heat. That chapter is reserved; the duty is at 14X-8-802.2.2, with a sixty-four-degree shoulder-season exception.
• Banking a partial payment during a nonpayment case. Section 5-12-130(g) waives the right to terminate for that breach.
• Assuming the five-day notice ends the tenant’s options. The one-time cure right runs until an order of possession issues.
• Declaring abandonment on unpaid rent alone. Section 5-12-130(e) requires absence plus, in one limb, removal of property, and always unpaid rent for the period.
• Applying the Illinois repair-and-deduct figure in Chicago. The state cap is the lesser of the two figures; Chicago’s is the greater, subject to a one-month ceiling.
• Ignoring the recycling flyer. Section 11-5-140 requires it to be handed over when the lease is signed, renewed or extended.

A well-drafted lease decides who wins a dispute; screening decides whether there is one. Chicago deserves particular care because so many of its remedies are multipliers rather than actual losses — two times the deposit, two months’ rent, twice the damages sustained — so a tenancy that goes wrong is expensive in ways that have little to do with the rent roll. Verifiable income, a clean payment history and no prior eviction filings remain the strongest predictors of a quiet tenancy. Our tenant screening report covers credit, eviction filings, criminal background and employment verification. Screen carefully — and screen in the order Cook County requires, because the Just Housing Amendment makes the sequence itself a compliance question: disclose the selection criteria before taking an application fee, pre-qualify on everything else first, and only then run criminal history, with the three-year lookback and the five-business-day dispute window. Our Illinois tenant screening laws guide covers the state layer, including the reusable-report rule that bars an application fee in defined circumstances.

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