Free Puerto Rico Residential Lease Agreement

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A configurable Puerto Rico contrato de arrendamiento that generates a signable multi-page PDF. Built to the Codigo Civil de Puerto Rico de 2020, arts. 1331 to 1350, as corrected by Ley 122-2026.

Puerto Rico Codigo Civil 2020 2026 Acts Applied Free PDF 2026 Edition

A Puerto Rico residential lease agreement is not governed by a landlord-tenant act, because Puerto Rico does not have one and never has. Puerto Rico is a civil-law jurisdiction, and a lease is the nominate contract of arrendamiento in the Codigo Civil de Puerto Rico de 2020 — Ley 55-2020, arts. 1331 through 1350, which are 31 L.P.R.A. secs. 10101 to 10173. That Code took effect on 28 November 2020 under its own art. 1820, and under art. 1819 it repealed the Codigo Civil de 1930 outright. Almost everything written in English about “Puerto Rico landlord-tenant law” still describes the 1930 Code, and the lease chapter did not merely move: it shrank from more than forty articles to twenty, and several rules that still circulate as current were deleted rather than renumbered. Nothing about that structure is cosmetic. There is no implied warranty of habitability — there is saneamiento. There is no security deposit statute at all. There is no notice to quit. Entry is not a landlord right with a notice period; it is a tenant obligation conditioned on justified cause and seven days’ notice. And on 23 June 2026, six weeks before this page was verified, Ley 122-2026 corrected a drafting inversion that had, on the face of the Code, required a written lease for terms of six years or less.

Complete the fields below to generate a Puerto Rico 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 at each point — including the three questions no imported template asks: whether saneamiento is reinforced, what deposit deadline the contract creates where the law creates none, and whether the dwelling sits inside a Regimen de Propiedad Horizontal. Before handing over keys, run proper tenant screening. Pair the signed lease with a Puerto Rico move-in / move-out checklist, which is your evidence of the state in which the premises were delivered under art. 1345(a) and must be restored under art. 1346(i).

The Civil Code — and specifically the Civil Code of 2020, not the one almost every English-language source is still describing. Puerto Rico has no Residential Landlord and Tenant Act, no uniform act, and no consumer statute governing residential tenancy. The lease is a nominate contract in a code, and it lives in Libro Cuarto, Capitulo VI — El Arrendamiento, arts. 1331 through 1350 of the Codigo Civil de Puerto Rico de 2020, enacted as Ley 55-2020 and codified at 31 L.P.R.A. secs. 10101 to 10173.

Art. 1331 defines it: by the contract of arrendamiento, the arrendador binds himself to cede temporarily to the arrendatario the use and enjoyment of a thing in exchange for a certain price. The price is the canon or alquiler. Those are not decorative labels — they are the words the Code uses, and a lease drafted in the vocabulary of landlord, tenant and rent is a translation of a document the court will read against a Spanish text.

Three other bodies of law sit alongside it. Eviction is not in the Civil Code: it is the desahucio chapter of the Ley de Procedimientos Legales Especiales, arts. 620 to 634, being Titulos XVI and XVIII of the Codigo de Enjuiciamiento Civil de 1933 and codified at 32 L.P.R.A. secs. 2821 to 2838. Costs and attorney fees come from Regla 44.1 of the Reglas de Procedimiento Civil de 2009, at 32 L.P.R.A. Ap. V. And the general contract articles — adhesion contracts at arts. 1247 to 1249, penalty clauses at art. 1257, saneamiento at arts. 1261 to 1270, mora and interest at arts. 1159 to 1169 — do far more work in a Puerto Rico tenancy than any equivalent does in a United States state. Our Puerto Rico landlord-tenant laws guide maps the whole structure.

Because the renumbering was total, and because the 2020 Code deleted rules rather than moving them. This is the single most important thing on this page, so it is worth being precise.

The Codigo Civil de Puerto Rico de 1930 carried the contract of arrendamiento at arts. 1432 and following, codified at 31 L.P.R.A. secs. 4011 to 4092. Art. 1819 of the 2020 Code is the clausula derogatoria: “Se deroga el Codigo Civil de Puerto Rico de 1930, segun enmendado.” Art. 1820 is the vigencia clause: the Code begins to govern one hundred eighty days after its approval on 1 June 2020, which is 28 November 2020. Every one of those old sections is now marked Derogado.

The replacement is not a re-lettering. It is a compression from more than forty articles into twenty, and here is what it changed:

• The fifteen-day holdover renewal is gone. Art. 1456 of the 1930 Code (31 L.P.R.A. sec. 4063) said that if the tenant remained in enjoyment for fifteen days with the landlord’s acquiescence there was tacita reconduccion for the periods fixed by two other sections. Art. 1335 of the 2020 Code has no holdover period and no renewal length at all: the lease simply continues on the same terms until a party notifies its will to resolve. Nearly every English-language Puerto Rico page still prints the fifteen days.
• The four grounds of eviction became three. Art. 1459 of the 1930 Code (sec. 4066) gave the landlord four: expiry of the term, falta de pago, infringement of any condition, and improper use. Art. 1348 of the 2020 Code gives three, and the nonpayment ground now requires two consecutive periods.
• The landlord’s duty to give a receipt for every payment is gone. It was art. 1444(4) (sec. 4051), added by Ley 220 of 1942. It was not carried into art. 1345. Meanwhile art. 1346(j) still obliges the tenant to deliver proof of payment — so the party who must prove payment is the one with no statutory right to a receipt.
• The forty-day repair abatement is gone. Art. 1448 (sec. 4055) reduced the rent proportionally where an urgent repair lasted more than forty days. The 2020 Code has no such provision.
• The presumption that the tenant received the property in good condition is gone (art. 1452, sec. 4059), and so is the rule making the tenant liable for deterioration unless he proves absence of fault (art. 1453, sec. 4060).
• A seven-day inspection notice was created that never existed before. The 1930 Code contained no entry provision whatever. Art. 1346(h) is new law.

There is exactly one situation in which the old numbers are the right ones, and it is worth knowing. Art. 1813 (31 L.P.R.A. sec. 11718) provides that the dispositions of the 2020 Code are not applicable to contracts in course of execution and in force at the moment it took effect. A lease running on 28 November 2020 continues under the 1930 Code. Art. 1812 adds that acts and contracts validly made under the earlier legislation produce their effects under it. So the 1930 articles are not fiction — they are the governing law of a small and shrinking class of long tenancies, and citing them for a lease signed today is simply wrong.

No, unless the term is longer than six years — and that answer changed six weeks before this page was verified.

Art. 1342 states the rule: libertad de forma. The contract of arrendamiento requires no special formality whatever for its validity, except where the object is an immovable and the parties intend to record it in the Registro de la Propiedad so that it has effect against third parties. An oral Puerto Rico residential lease is valid and enforceable between the parties. The claim, repeated on several ranking pages, that all Puerto Rico rental agreements must be in writing is not law.

Art. 1343 is where it got complicated. As enacted in 2020 it read that where the arrendamiento of an immovable is agreed for a term no mayor de seis (6) anos — NOT MORE than six years — it must be in writing. Read literally, that imposed a writing requirement on precisely the short leases art. 1342 had just freed from formality, and it flatly contradicted the article immediately before it. It also cut against art. 1245(b), which requires a public or private instrument, for evidentiary purposes, for the lease of immovables of six years or more, and against the Registry Act, under which leases of six years or more are the recordable ones.

Ley 122-2026, approved 23 June 2026 and effective immediately on approval, reversed the phrase. Art. 1343 now reads that where the arrendamiento of an immovable is agreed for a term greater than six years it must be in writing. The Exposicion de Motivos of the Act says so in its own words: it calls the pre-amendment text a conflicto normativo that produced confusion among arrendadores, arrendatarios and lawyers, and in the qualification and recording process at the Registro de la Propiedad, and it restores the general principle of freedom of form for leases of short and medium duration.

One seam survives, and a practitioner should know about it. Art. 1343 now says “greater than six years”; art. 1245(b) still says “six years or more”. A lease of exactly six years therefore falls inside art. 1245(b)’s evidentiary requirement and outside art. 1343’s validity requirement. Art. 1246 lets either contracting party compel the other to grant the formality a valid contract needs, and to join an action for performance — so the practical answer for a six-year lease is to put it in an instrument and stop worrying about which article compels it.

One year. Art. 1333 provides that the arrendamiento of immovables is considered concluded for a term of one year, except where a different term has been agreed. That is a real gap-filler with real consequences, and it is nothing like the month-to-month default a United States reader expects. A Puerto Rico handshake tenancy is an annual lease.

Art. 1332 says duration may be determinate or indeterminate, and art. 1334 adds two rules that have no common-law analogue. The death of the arrendador and the alienation of the leased thing do not affect the agreed duration, absent contrary agreement — so a Puerto Rico lease survives a sale by force of the Code, without any recording requirement. And where the object is an immovable dedicated to housing, the relatives of the arrendatario who resided with him during the six months preceding his death, or a person who resided with him for the same time, may substitute him in the lease. That is a statutory succession right for a live-in partner, relative or carer, and no imported template contemplates it. It is one of several reasons the “other residents” field on this form matters.

It continues on the same terms until somebody says otherwise. Art. 1335 is the 2020 Code’s tacita reconduccion, and it is one sentence: once the agreed term arrives, the lease continues on the same contracted terms until either party notifies the other of its will to resolve the contract. A second sentence adds that in that case, obligations granted by a third party to secure the principal contract — a guarantor’s undertaking, for example — cease as to the continuation.

Notice what is absent. There is no fifteen-day holdover trigger, no requirement that the landlord acquiesce, and no fixed renewal period. The 1930 Code had all three. The practical effect is that a Puerto Rico fixed-term lease does not expire cleanly: it rolls on indefinitely, on identical terms, until a notification is given. The Code prescribes no length for that notification either, which is why this builder writes into the lease that it must be in writing and must state the end date.

The other practical effect concerns guarantors. A parent or employer who guaranteed a twelve-month lease is released as to the continuation by the second sentence of art. 1335. A landlord who wants continuing security has to obtain it afresh. See our Puerto Rico lease termination laws guide.

Because art. 1249(f) names it, and because art. 1335 makes it pointless. This is the clearest example on the page of a clause that is standard in imported templates and actively harmful here.

Art. 1249 lists the clauses that are especialmente anulables — especially voidable — in a contract celebrated by adhesion. Subsection (f) is: a clause that, on the adherent’s silence, prorogues or renews a contract of determinate duration. A landlord’s standard-form lease is the paradigm contrato de adhesion, as art. 1248 defines it: one where the accepting party is compelled to accept a predisposed content. So the “this lease renews automatically for a further twelve months unless the tenant gives sixty days’ notice” clause is precisely the clause the Code singles out.

And it buys the landlord nothing, because art. 1335 already continues the lease on the same terms without any clause at all. The correct Puerto Rico drafting is to say nothing about renewal and to state instead how the notification under art. 1335 must be given. That is what the generator on this page does, and it says so on the face of the lease.

Anything the parties agree, because Puerto Rico has no security deposit statute. This is the largest single gap between what circulates in English and what the law says.

The word deposito does not appear anywhere in the twenty articles of the arrendamiento chapter. There is no cap. There is no trust or escrow duty. There is no interest requirement. There is no itemization requirement. There is no return deadline. And there is no statutory penalty for wrongfully withholding a deposit — no double damages, no treble damages, no forfeiture of the right to withhold, none of the machinery a United States state supplies.

Several pages ranking for Puerto Rico rental questions state that a landlord may collect one month’s rent for a dwelling and two months for commercial premises, and that the deposit must be returned within thirty days. Neither figure has a source in Puerto Rico law. They appear to be a description of market practice presented as regulation, and in at least one case they sit next to a description of the repealed rent-control statute.

What the deposit actually is, in Puerto Rico terms, is a contractual fianza — a security given to guarantee performance. Its return is governed by the lease, by the general law of obligations, and by art. 15, which requires rights to be exercised and duties performed in accordance with good faith, and art. 18, under which the law does not protect the abuse of a right or its exercise contrary to the social order. Those two articles, plus the contra-proferentem rules at arts. 1247 and 1248, are what a court has to work with.

The consequence for drafting is direct and it is why this builder handles the deposit the way it does: if the lease does not create a return deadline and an itemization duty, the tenant has none. The form therefore makes the deadline a required choice and writes it into the PDF as an express contractual undertaking, with the reasons stated. Read the whole picture in our Puerto Rico security deposit laws guide, and document the condition at both ends with a Puerto Rico security deposit itemization.

No, and Ley 464 has been fully repealed since 1998. Because this question keeps producing wrong answers, here is the chain, read in the repealing statute itself.

Ley Num. 464 de 25 de abril de 1946, the Ley de Alquileres Razonables, imposed controls on residential and commercial rents. It was expressly temporary, tied to the emergency created by the Second World War, and it froze rents at their level of 1 October 1942. Its own art. 23 said its operative provisions would cease when the Legislative Assembly declared by concurrent resolution that the emergency had ended.

That never happened. Instead, Ley 57 de 25 de junio de 1995 repealed it on a staggered schedule. Art. 2 lifted it, after one year, from dwellings renting at one hundred fifty dollars a month or more and commercial premises at three hundred dollars or more. Art. 3 lifted it, after two years, at one hundred dollars and two hundred dollars respectively. And art. 4 provided that after three years from approval, the application of Ley 464 would cease completely as to every dwelling and commercial premises in Puerto Rico and that Act would be repealed in its totality. Three years from 25 June 1995 is 25 June 1998.

Two consequences follow, and both are worth stating plainly because they contradict material still in circulation. Puerto Rico has had no residential rent control for more than a quarter of a century. And the Departamento de Asuntos del Consumidor no longer has jurisdiction over residential tenancy, because the Reglamento de Inquilinato it administered fell with the Act that authorised it. A tenant with a rent or deposit dispute goes to court, not to an agency. Our Puerto Rico rent increase laws guide covers what follows from that.

The parties set it, and no notice is required by statute. Art. 1340 provides that the alquiler is agreed by the parties according to the value of the leased thing, or is determined on that same criterion by a third party they designate; and where that person will not or cannot determine it, the court determines it. That last limb is a genuinely civil-law solution and it has no American equivalent: a Puerto Rico lease can be valid with the price left to a designated appraiser, and a stalled appraisal is fixed by the tribunal rather than voiding the contract.

There is no rent-increase notice statute, no cap, and no percentage limit. What constrains an increase is the contract: during a fixed term the agreed canon binds, and altering it is a modification which art. 1344