Free Louisiana Residential Lease Agreement

▶ Watch walk-through

A configurable Louisiana residential lease agreement that generates a signable multi-page PDF. Built to the Civil Code Title of Lease, the warranty against vices and defects, and the deposit rules as changed by Act 63 of 2026.

Louisiana Civil Code 2668-2729 2026 Acts Applied Free PDF 2026 Edition

A Louisiana residential lease agreement is not governed by a landlord-tenant act, because Louisiana does not have one. Louisiana is the only civil-law state in the United States, and the law of lease lives in the Civil Code — Title IX of Book III, arts. 2668 through 2729, substantially revised by Acts 2004, No. 821 — supplemented by the Lessee’s Deposit Act at La. R.S. 9:3251 and following, a handful of scattered sections of Revised Statutes Title 9, and the eviction articles of the Code of Civil Procedure at arts. 4701 through 4735. Nothing about that structure is cosmetic. It means the landlord owes a warranty against vices or defects rather than an implied warranty of habitability; it means the tenant genuinely has repair-and-deduct, in a Civil Code article rather than a statute; it means the lessee may sublet unless the lease says otherwise; and it means a lessee can lawfully waive the five-day notice to vacate in the lease itself. Three acts of the 2026 Regular Session took effect on 1 August 2026 and are not yet in the codified text that most sources are reading.

Complete the fields below to generate a Louisiana residential lease agreement as a signable multi-page PDF. Every field you fill is written into the document, and the generated lease cites the controlling Civil Code article or Revised Statutes section at each point — including the three questions no other Louisiana template asks: the warranty waiver, the La. R.S. 9:3221 assumption of responsibility, and whether the lessee waives the notice to vacate. Before handing over keys, run proper tenant screening. Pair the signed lease with a Louisiana move-in / move-out checklist, which is your evidence of the condition in which the premises were delivered under La. Civ. Code art. 2684 and returned under art. 2683.

The Civil Code — there is no Louisiana landlord-tenant act. Every other state in this series has a statute called something like a Residential Landlord and Tenant Act, most of them descended from the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act. Louisiana has neither. Its law of lease is Title IX of Book III of the Civil Code, arts. 2668 through 2729, rewritten from the ground up by Acts 2004, No. 821 with effect from 1 January 2005. Article 2668 defines lease as a synallagmatic contract by which the lessor binds himself to give the lessee the use and enjoyment of a thing for a term in exchange for a rent. Article 2669 then says that in all matters the Title does not provide for, the contract of lease is governed by the rules on obligations and on conventional obligations — which is why a Louisiana lease dispute so often turns into a general contract dispute.

Two more bodies of law sit on top. The Lessee’s Deposit Act, La. R.S. 9:3251 through 9:3254, governs the return of a security deposit and nothing else. A scattering of sections in Revised Statutes Title 9 add the pieces the Civil Code leaves out: 9:3221 on assumption of responsibility for condition, 9:3258.1 on rental application fees, 9:3259 on attorney fees for delinquent rent under oral leases, 9:3259.2 on rent subsidies and eviction, 9:3260 on mitigation after constructive eviction, 9:3260.1 on foreclosure disclosure, 9:3261 on military termination, and 9:3261.1 and 9:3261.2 on victims of domestic abuse and of sexual assault. Eviction is not in either place: it lives entirely in Code of Civil Procedure Title XI, arts. 4701 through 4735, with jurisdiction allocated by art. 4844.

A practical consequence follows immediately. Because the governing text is a code rather than a consumer-protection statute, most of it is suppletive — it applies unless the parties agree otherwise. Article 2703 opens with the words “in the absence of a contrary agreement, usage, or custom.” The mandatory rules are the exceptions, and they are worth learning by name, because they are the only ones a lease cannot move. Our Louisiana landlord-tenant laws guide maps the whole structure.

Article 2671 characterises a lease by its agreed use: residential where the thing is to be occupied as a dwelling, and separately agricultural, mineral, commercial and consumer. Where a thing is leased for more than one purpose, the dominant purpose decides how it is regulated. That classification is what pulls a dwelling into the protective rules — the art. 2698 extension of the warranty to everyone who resides in the premises, and the art. 2699 bar on waiving health-and-safety defects, both turn on the lease being residential.

On term, Louisiana is unusually explicit. Article 2678 says a lease shall be for a term, fixed or indeterminate. Article 2679 caps any term at ninety-nine years; a longer term, or an option to extend past it, is reduced to ninety-nine years by operation of law. And art. 2680 supplies a term where the parties agreed none: a lease of an immovable, or of a movable used as a residence, is from month to month. That default matters more than it looks, because an oral Louisiana tenancy is enforceable — art. 2681 says a lease may be made orally or in writing — so a handshake tenancy is a month-to-month lease with a ten-day termination notice, not a void arrangement.

Act 240 of 2026 tidied art. 2681 by moving its second sentence into a new article. Since 1 August 2026, art. 2681.1 states the rule: a lease of an immovable has effect against third persons from the time it is filed for registry in the manner prescribed by legislation. The Law Institute’s Revision Comments say this does not change the law, and they are right — but it puts the point where a reader will find it, and the point is sharp. An unrecorded Louisiana lease binds the parties completely and binds a purchaser of the building not at all. New art. 2681.2 supplies the parallel rule for movables, which take effect against third persons on actual delivery to a good-faith lessee.

There is no limit. No Louisiana statute caps a residential security deposit. The Lessee’s Deposit Act regulates only what happens to the money at the end; the Civil Code Title of Lease does not mention deposits at all. A Louisiana landlord may ask for one month, two months, or more, and a pet deposit on top, and no statute says otherwise. This is genuinely unusual — most states in this series cap the deposit at one, one and a half, or two months’ rent.

What Louisiana does regulate, and regulates firmly, is the return. La. R.S. 9:3251(A) provides that any advance or deposit of money furnished by a tenant to secure the performance of any part of a written or oral lease shall be returned to the tenant of residential or dwelling premises within one month after the lease terminates, except that the lessor may retain all or any portion reasonably necessary to remedy a default of the tenant or to remedy unreasonable wear to the premises. Two limbs of that sentence deserve attention. “Reasonably necessary” is the standard, not “the landlord’s estimate.” And “unreasonable wear” is the standard, which means ordinary wear is not deductible.

Three further rules complete the section. The tenant must furnish the lessor a forwarding address at termination, to which the statement may be sent. Under subsection B, if the lessor transfers his interest during the term, he must transfer the deposit to his successor and is then relieved of liability, and the transferee becomes responsible for returning it. And under subsection C, subsection A does not apply at all where the tenant abandons the premises, either without giving the notice required or before the lease terminates — a carve-out that catches a great many tenants who leave early. See our Louisiana security deposit laws guide.

One month for the money. Since 1 August 2026, up to one month plus fifteen days for the itemized statement. This is the single change on this page that no competitor carries, and it is worth being precise about.

Before Act 63, La. R.S. 9:3251(A) read: if any portion of an advance or deposit is retained by a landlord, he shall forward to the tenant, within one month after the date the tenancy terminates, an itemized statement accounting for the proceeds retained and giving the reasons. Act 63 of the 2026 Regular Session — House Bill 292, by Representatives Boyd and Taylor, passed the House eighty-seven to three and the Senate thirty-five to nil, signed on 11 May 2026 and effective 1 August 2026 — amended that clause to read: within one month after the date the tenancy terminates or within fifteen days after the date that is one month after the tenancy terminates.

The bill as filed would have done something different and broader: it would have let the parties agree in writing on a return date up to two months after termination. The House Committee on Civil Law and Procedure struck that and substituted the fifteen-day extension for the statement alone. The enacted result is narrow and specific. The deadline for returning the money did not move. A Louisiana lessor still owes the refund within one month. What changed is that the paperwork explaining a deduction may follow up to fifteen days later.

Why this matters in practice: under La. R.S. 9:3252 the trigger for the penalty is a wilful failure to comply with La. R.S. 9:3251, and failure to remit within thirty days after written demand is defined as wilful. A lessor who returns the balance on time but is still assembling invoices now has a defined additional window for the accounting rather than having to guess. A tenant reading a pre-2026 summary will calculate the deadline wrongly. Build the statement with our Louisiana security deposit itemization form and send the balance with a Louisiana security deposit return letter.

La. R.S. 9:3252 gives the tenant the portion of the deposit wrongfully retained and, in addition, three hundred dollars or twice the wrongfully retained portion, whichever is greater. Two errors are common in secondary coverage. The first is describing the penalty as a flat sum instead of the greater of two amounts stacked on top of the refund. The second is quoting the older figure: the three-hundred-dollar floor dates only from Acts 2018, No. 416, effective 1 January 2019, and pages written before then said two hundred.

The definition of wilfulness is the operative part. Failure to remit within thirty days after written demand for a refund shall constitute wilful failure. That sentence is what a tenant should act on: make the demand in writing, date it, keep proof of delivery, and the thirty days start to run. Venue is generous — subsection B allows the action in the parish of the lessor’s domicile or the parish where the property is situated.

On fees, the rankers get it backwards. La. R.S. 9:3253 provides that in an action brought under La. R.S. 9:3252 the court may in its discretion award costs and attorney fees to the prevailing party. It is discretionary, not mandatory, and it runs to whichever party prevails — a Louisiana landlord who successfully defends a deposit claim can be awarded fees against the tenant. Coverage that presents this as an automatic tenant fee award is describing a statute that does not exist. It is also a different penalty from the two hundred dollars payable under La. R.S. 9:3260.1 for a foreclosure-disclosure violation, which some pages conflate with it.

Finally, La. R.S. 9:3254 makes any waiver of the right of a tenant under this Part null and void. The deposit rules are one of the few genuinely mandatory corners of Louisiana lease law, and a lease clause purporting to shorten the month, disclaim the itemization, or waive the penalty simply does not operate.

It is Louisiana’s answer to the implied warranty of habitability, and it is broader in some ways and narrower in others. La. Civ. Code art. 2696 provides that the lessor warrants the lessee that the thing is suitable for the purpose for which it was leased and that it is free of vices or defects that prevent its use for that purpose, and that the warranty also extends to vices or defects arising after delivery that are not attributable to the lessee’s fault.

Three articles extend it. Article 2697 makes the warranty encompass vices or defects not known to the lessor — it is not a knowledge-based duty — though a lessee who knows of a vice and fails to notify the lessor may have his recovery reduced accordingly. Article 2698 provides that in a residential lease the warranty applies to all persons who reside in the premises in accordance with the lease, which reaches a spouse, children and roommates who never signed. And art. 2700 adds the warranty of peaceful possession, which in a residential lease encompasses a disturbance caused by a person who, with the lessor’s consent, has access to the premises or occupies adjacent property belonging to the lessor — in other words, a nuisance neighbour in the same landlord’s building is the landlord’s problem. Article 2701, amended by Acts 2025, No. 488, sets out how the lessor must act and how a lessee may call the lessor into a third party’s suit; art. 2702 confirms the lessor is not bound to protect against a disturbance by someone claiming no right.

Alongside the warranty sit the plain repair duties. Article 2682 binds the lessor to deliver the thing, to maintain it in a condition suitable for the purpose for which it was leased, and to protect peaceful possession. Article 2684 requires delivery at the agreed time and in good condition. Article 2691 requires the lessor to make all repairs that become necessary during the lease except those for which the lessee is responsible, and art. 2690 forbids the lessor to make alterations during the lease. Article 2692 puts on the lessee the repair of damage caused by his fault or that of his guests, and deterioration beyond normal use. Article 2688 requires the lessee to notify the lessor without delay of damage, needed repair or disturbance — and gives the lessor damages if he does not. See our Louisiana habitability laws guide.

Only within limits, and never for health or safety in a home. La. Civ. Code art. 2699 is one of the most quietly important articles in Louisiana lease law and it is missing from every ranking page we examined. It provides that the warranty against vices or defects may be waived — but only by clear and unambiguous language that is brought to the attention of the lessee. Boilerplate buried on page four does not qualify.

Then come three carve-outs. A waiver is ineffective:

• to the extent it pertains to vices or defects of which the lessee did not know and the lessor knew or should have known — the landlord cannot contract out of what he was hiding;
• to the extent it is contrary to La. Civ. Code art. 2004, which nullifies any clause that in advance excludes or limits liability for intentional or gross fault causing damage, or for causing physical injury; and
• in a residential or consumer lease, to the extent it purports to waive the warranty for vices or defects that seriously affect health or safety.

That third limb is the one to remember. In a Louisiana home, the parties may allocate the risk of a cosmetic or inconvenient defect; they may not allocate the risk of a defect that seriously affects health or safety. The form above therefore offers only two positions — no waiver, or a limited waiver expressly confined to non-health-and-safety vices — and the generated lease recites all three carve-outs on its face, so that neither side can later claim the waiver was wider than the Code allows.

It is the Louisiana liability-shift clause, and no other state has anything like it. La. R.S. 9:3221 provides that notwithstanding La. Civ. Code art. 2699, the owner of premises leased under a contract whereby the lessee assumes responsibility for their condition is not liable for injury caused by any defect in them — to the lessee, or to anyone on the premises who derives his right to be there from the lessee — unless the owner knew or should have known of the defect, or had received notice of it and failed to remedy it within a reasonable time.

Read the pieces carefully, because Louisiana practitioners argue about all of them. First, the shift only happens if the lease actually contains the assumption; it is not a default. Second, the shift is about delictual liability for injury, not about the lessor’s contractual repair duties, which continue to run under arts. 2682 and 2691. Third, the exceptions are not optional extras: actual knowledge, constructive knowledge, and notice plus a failure to remedy in a reasonable time each defeat the protection. That is why the notice obligation in art. 2688 — the lessee must tell the lessor without delay — is worth restating in the lease: it is the mechanism that starts the clock on the exception.

The clause appears in almost every commercially drafted Louisiana lease and in almost no free template. This generator makes it an explicit election rather than smuggling it into the boilerplate, and where it is selected the generated lease sets out the statutory exceptions in the same paragraph so that a tenant reading the document knows what the clause does and does not do.

Yes — and this is where the absence of a landlord-tenant act misleads people. La. Civ. Code art. 2694 provides that if the lessor fails to perform his obligation to make necessary repairs within a reasonable time after demand by the lessee, the lessee may cause them to be made, and may either demand immediate reimbursement of the amount expended or apply that amount to the payment of rent — but only to the extent the repair was necessary and the amount expended was reasonable.

Three preconditions sit in that sentence and a tenant who skips one loses. There must be a demand; a reasonable time must pass; and the repair must have been necessary and the cost reasonable. Documenting the demand in writing is not a formality, it is the whole case, which is why the generated lease repeats the art. 2688 notice duty and why a dated written request is worth more than a phone call.

Article 2693 is the mirror image and is just as important. If during the lease the premises require a repair that cannot be postponed until the end of the term, the lessor has the right to make it even though the lessee suffers inconvenience or loss of use. The lessee’s remedy is then a reduction or abatement of the rent, or dissolution of the lease, depending on all the circumstances, including each party’s fault, the length of the repair period and the extent of the loss of use. That is the Louisiana answer to a month without a working kitchen: not withholding, but abatement or dissolution.

Where a partial loss or substantial impairment is not the lessor’s doing at all, art. 2715 allows a diminution of rent or dissolution, whichever is more appropriate — with the nuance that where the impairment is caused by circumstances external to the leased thing, the lessee gets dissolution but not a rent reduction. If the premises are lost, totally destroyed or expropriated without fault, art. 2714 terminates the lease and neither party owes damages. In a state with hurricanes, those two articles are load-bearing, and La. R.S. 9:3260 adds that where a lessee has been constructively evicted and the premises are rendered uninhabitable through no fault of the lessee, the lessor must mitigate his damages — the specific application of the general duty at La. Civ. Code art. 2002.

None by statute — and that is not an omission in this page. We read the whole Civil Code Title of Lease and the whole of the lease-related sections of Revised Statutes Title 9. There is no landlord entry or access provision anywhere in Louisiana law. No notice period, no limit on hours, no statutory prohibition on abusing access.

The nearest thing is art. 2693, and it points the other way: it gives the lessor a right to enter and make a repair that cannot be postponed, with the lessee’s protection coming as rent abatement rather than as a right to refuse. Sources asserting a twenty-four-hour Louisiana entry rule have no Louisiana source; they are importing another state’s statute.

The drafting consequence is direct. In Louisiana, any notice a tenant receives before an ordinary entry exists only because the lease creates it, so the form above asks you to choose a period rather than printing a figure. A lease that is silent leaves the question to general principles and to whatever the parties can argue afterwards, which serves neither side. See Louisiana landlord entry laws, and document each visit with a dated Louisiana notice to enter form.

La. Civ. Code art. 2703 supplies the default: in the absence of a contrary agreement, usage or custom, the rent is due at the beginning of the term, and if the rent is payable by intervals shorter than the term, at the beginning of each interval; and it is payable at the address provided by the lessor, and failing that, at the address of the lessee. That second limb is worth noticing — a Louisiana lessor who gives no address has made the rent payable at the tenant’s door.

Article 2675 allows rent to consist of money, commodities, fruits, services or other performances sufficient to support an onerous contract, and art. 2676 requires it to be fixed in a sum certain or determinable by an agreed method. If the agreed method proves unworkable and the rent has never been established, there is no lease; if it was established and is later subject to redetermination that fails, the court may fix it.

Louisiana sets no statutory grace period and no cap on late fees. There is no residential late-fee statute at all. The lease must state the fee for it to be chargeable, and the practical limit is judicial: a charge out of proportion to the lessor’s actual loss invites attack as a penalty rather than a reasonable stipulation of damages. Our Louisiana late fee laws guide covers the drafting, and Louisiana rent increase laws covers changing rent on a month-to-month tenancy, which in Louisiana runs through the art. 2728 termination notice. Send it with a Louisiana rent increase notice.

One statute does touch fees, and it is narrower than it looks. La. R.S. 9:3259 makes a lessee liable for reasonable attorney fees where he fails to pay delinquent rent within twenty days after a written demand correctly setting out the amount due — delivered by certified mail, by personal delivery, or by tacking it on the door of the leased premises. Subsection C then limits the entire section to oral leases only. On a written Louisiana lease it does nothing, and any fee entitlement has to come from the lease itself. If rent is simply late, a Louisiana late rent notice is the first step.

A lease with a fixed term terminates on the expiration of that term without need of notice under art. 2720. Then comes the trap. Under art. 2721 a lease with a fixed term is reconducted if, after the term expires and without notice to vacate or terminate or other opposition by either party, the lessee remains in possession — for one week in the case of a lease whose fixed term was longer than a week, for one day where the term was a week or shorter, and for thirty days in an agricultural lease.

One week. A Louisiana landlord who lets a tenant stay eight days past the end of a twelve-month lease, without opposing it, has renewed the tenancy. Article 2723 then makes the reconducted lease run from month to month where the original term was a month or longer, art. 2724 continues every provision of the old lease into the new one, and the reconducted lease can afterwards be ended only by the notice directed in arts. 2727 through 2729. If the intention is not to renew, serve a Louisiana notice of non-renewal before the term runs out. Article 2725 handles a true extension under an option, and art. 2726 confirms that amending a provision without intending a novation does not create a new lease.

For a lease with an indeterminate term — including a reconducted lease and one whose term came from art. 2680 — art. 2727 says it terminates by notice, and art. 2728 sets the timing:

• 30 calendar days before the end of the period, where the term is measured by a period longer than a month;
• 10 calendar days before the end of that month, in a month-to-month lease;
• 5 calendar days before the end of the period, where the period is equal to or longer than a week but shorter than a month;
• at any time before it expires, where the period is shorter than a week.

Ten days is the number most often reported wrongly as thirty. A timely notice terminates the lease at the end of the period specified in it, and if none is specified, at the end of