Free Illinois Lead Paint Disclosure

An Illinois lead paint disclosure is the federally mandated form a landlord delivers to a prospective tenant before any lease of residential property built before 1978. It carries the fixed federal lead warning statement, states the lessor’s actual knowledge of lead-based paint and hazards, lists the records being handed over, documents the tenant’s receipt of the lead hazard brochure, captures any agent’s acknowledgment, and is signed and dated by every party. The federal authority is 42 U.S.C. 4852d (Section 1018 of Title X, the Residential Lead-Based Paint Hazard Reduction Act of 1992), implemented at 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart F (EPA) and 24 CFR Part 35 Subpart A (HUD). But Illinois is different from most states: it layers a real statute on top. The Lead Poisoning Prevention Act, 410 ILCS 45, adds a brochure duty, a renewal-disclosure duty, a mitigation clock, criminal exposure, and — the provision almost every competing page misses — a bar on entering a new lease for a unit under an unresolved mitigation notice. Generate the form below, then read on for exactly what both layers require.

▶ Watch overview

Illinois lead paint disclosure overview

The lead paint disclosure — often called the Section 1018 disclosure, after the 1992 statute that created it — is the formal federal notice an Illinois landlord delivers to a prospective tenant for any residential property built before 1978. It does four things in one document.

First, it puts the tenant on notice of potential lead exposure through the federally mandated lead warning statement, the fixed language at 40 CFR 745.113(b)(1) that must be attached to or included within the lease.

Second, it transmits the lessor’s actual knowledge of lead-based paint or hazards in the dwelling. The lessor picks one of exactly two positions: known lead-based paint or hazards are present, with a description of what is known; or the lessor has no knowledge of lead-based paint or hazards in the housing. There is no third box, and there is no “maybe”.

Third, it transmits any reports the lessor holds from prior inspections, risk assessments, or hazard-reduction work. The lessor either provides copies of all available records and lists them, or affirmatively states that no reports or records exist.

Fourth, it documents the tenant’s receipt of the disclosure and of the lead hazard brochure. The signed acknowledgment is the landlord’s primary defence in any later EPA, HUD, or IDPH inquiry or private civil action.

The disclosure is not optional and the duty is not waivable by agreement. A pre-1978 Illinois rental leased without one exposes the landlord to government civil penalties and to a tenant’s private action for triple damages plus fees. Compliance takes fifteen minutes; non-compliance is the most expensive paperwork failure in pre-1978 rental practice — and in Illinois, as the next section explains, it is not only paperwork at stake.

Yes — and this is where Illinois parts company with most of the country. A great many “Illinois lead paint disclosure” pages describe the federal rule, add a sentence implying some vague state overlay of “certification or registration”, and stop. That is guesswork. Illinois has a specific, codified, operative statute: the Lead Poisoning Prevention Act, 410 ILCS 45, administered by the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH).

The Act uses a deliberately broad scope term. Under 410 ILCS 45/2, a regulated facility means “a residential building or child care facility” — so ordinary rental housing is squarely inside it. A lead hazard means “a lead-bearing substance that poses an immediate health hazard to humans”, and lead mitigation means “the remediation, in a manner described in Section 9, of a lead hazard so that the lead-bearing substance does not pose an immediate health hazard to humans”.

The operative provision for landlords is 410 ILCS 45/9.1, “Owner’s obligation to give notice”. It carries four distinct duties that get flattened into one vague sentence everywhere else. Separating them matters, because they have different triggers.

Duty 1 — the IDPH brochure, for every pre-1978 rental

This one applies to you whether or not anything has ever been found in your building. Section 9.1 provides that before entering into a residential lease agreement, all owners of regulated facilities containing dwelling units built before 1978 shall give prospective lessees information on the potential health hazards posed by lead by providing them “a copy of an informational brochure prepared by the Department”, consistent with 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart F.

Note the scope carefully. The federal exemptions — zero-bedroom units, short leases, elderly housing — are carve-outs from the federal definition of target housing. The Illinois brochure duty is written to reach all owners of pre-1978 dwelling units without repeating those carve-outs. The conservative reading, and the one we recommend, is to deliver the brochure to every pre-1978 Illinois tenant regardless of whether a federal exemption might apply.

Duty 2 — disclosing a mitigation notice on renewal or sale

If IDPH or a delegate agency has served you a mitigation notice, Section 9.1 requires you, before renewing an existing lease or entering a new sales contract for that unit, to provide “the current lessee or lessees, if the lease is to be renewed, and prospective purchasers of that unit with written notice that a lead hazard has previously been identified” — discharged by delivering a copy of the mitigation notice and the inspection report. The duty falls away once you hold a certificate of compliance.

Duty 3 — the new-lease bar

This is the provision that should change how an Illinois landlord thinks about lead, and it is absent from every competing page we could find. An owner who has received a mitigation notice — or who purchased the facility from an owner who received one — must, before entering into a new lease agreement for the dwelling unit, “mitigate the lead hazard previously identified in the regulated facility and obtain a certificate of compliance under Section 9.”

Duty 4 — telling IDPH about a sale

An owner who sells a unit that was under a mitigation notice must give the Department written notice of the sale, including the date of the sale and the name, address, telephone number, and email address of the purchaser. The obligation follows the property to the new owner, which is why buyers of older Illinois rental stock should ask about mitigation notices during diligence rather than discovering one after closing.

Illinois adds three more things worth knowing. Our Illinois habitability laws guide covers the implied warranty of habitability recognised in Jack Spring, Inc. v. Little, 50 Ill. 2d 351 (1972), which applies to deteriorated paint independently of any disclosure. Illinois also requires a separate radon disclosure in most residential leases, handled by our Illinois radon disclosure form — a different hazard, a different statute, and not satisfied by this form. And because the federal layer is identical in every state, our federal lead-based paint disclosure form is the generic version of the Illinois form on this page.

Most guides list “three things” a landlord must do. The regulation is more precise than that. 40 CFR 745.113(b) requires six distinct elements in the lease or an attachment to it. A disclosure missing any one of them is defective, regardless of how professional the form looks. This is the checklist to audit your own paperwork against.

Note what is not in that list: no inspection window, no testing requirement, no filing with any agency, and no obligation to remediate. The federal rule makes you tell the truth about what you know and hand over what you hold; it does not make you go looking. In Illinois, remember, the remediation gap is filled by 410 ILCS 45 — but only once IDPH has identified a hazard and served a notice.

“Target housing” is the federal term for property subject to the rule. The definition at 40 CFR 745.103 is residential dwellings constructed before 1 January 1978, subject to the narrow exclusions in the next section.

Why 1978 — and which 1978 date actually governs. The operative cutoff comes from the definition itself: 40 CFR 745.103 defines target housing as housing constructed prior to 1978, meaning construction before 1 January 1978. The historical reason that year was chosen is the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s ban on lead-containing paint at 16 CFR 1303.1 — but that ban applies to paint manufactured after 27 February 1978, which is not the same date. Competing pages routinely merge the two and report the CPSC ban as effective 1 January 1978. It was not. The distinction has no practical effect on your compliance answer, because the construction cutoff in 745.103 is what decides coverage, but it does tell you which cite to trust: for whether your unit is covered, read 745.103, not the CPSC rule. Housing constructed from 1 January 1978 onward sits outside the disclosure regime entirely.

How to verify the build year in Illinois. The county assessor’s or supervisor of assessments’ record is the fastest authoritative source, and Cook County and the collar counties all publish parcel data online. The original certificate of occupancy, the building permit file, and title records also establish it. The lessor carries the burden of correctly identifying target housing — “I think it was around 1980” is not a defence, and a guess that turns out wrong is a knowing violation waiting to happen.

Renovation does not reset the clock. A 1962 building stripped to the studs and rebuilt in 2001 is still target housing. The original construction date controls, not the date of the most recent renovation. This trips up owners of heavily rehabbed older stock constantly.

Common areas in multi-unit buildings. If the building predates 1978, the disclosure scope reaches the common areas as well as the leased unit — hallways, stairwells, porches, laundry rooms, and shared storage. This has a practical consequence for records, covered below: a building-wide evaluation is disclosable to every tenant in the building, not just the one whose unit it sampled.

Illinois context. Illinois has some of the oldest housing stock in the United States, and the compliance exposure is correspondingly high. Chicago’s bungalow belt, two-flats, and greystones are overwhelmingly pre-1978, as are large parts of Evanston, Oak Park, Cicero, Berwyn, Aurora, Joliet, Rockford, Peoria, Springfield, and East St. Louis. Illinois also has a long-standing childhood lead-poisoning surveillance programme, which means elevated blood-lead results in older Illinois housing are detected and investigated — and under 410 ILCS 45/8 an elevated result is exactly what triggers an IDPH inspection of the unit. Portfolio landlords with mixed-vintage holdings are the ones who get caught, because the compliance answer differs unit by unit. When in doubt, verify against the assessor record rather than relying on the exemption.

Even pre-1978 property can fall outside the federal rule. The carve-outs are narrow, and they come from two different places in the regulation — which is why competing lists of “the lead paint exemptions” disagree with one another. Some are exclusions written into the definition of target housing at 40 CFR 745.103: a unit that meets one of those was never target housing in the first place. The others are transaction-level exemptions listed at 40 CFR 745.101: the housing is target housing, but this particular deal is outside the subpart. The compliance answer is often the same either way, but knowing which provision governs tells you which text to read and which facts matter. Verify against the current rule before relying on any of them.

• Housing built in 1978 or later (40 CFR 745.103). Not target housing at all.
• Zero-bedroom units (40 CFR 745.103, definitional). A dwelling in which the living area is not separated from the sleeping area — efficiencies, studio apartments, dormitory housing, military barracks, and rentals of individual rooms. This exclusion became conditional when 745.103 was amended effective January 13, 2025 (89 FR 89416): the child-under-six condition now attaches to this limb too, so a 0-bedroom dwelling is target housing where a child under six resides or is expected. It sat outside target housing whether or not a young child lived there only under the pre-2025 rule, which stale charts still repeat.
• Housing for the elderly or persons with disabilities (40 CFR 745.103, definitional), where the housing is specifically designated as such — unless a child under six resides or is expected to reside there.
• Short-term leases of 100 days or less (40 CFR 745.101(c)), where no lease renewal or extension can occur. Vacation and short-term rentals typically qualify; a month-to-month tenancy does not, because it renews.
• Certified lead-free housing (40 CFR 745.101(b)). Property inspected by a certified inspector and found free of lead-based paint. Retain the certification; it is the only proof of the exemption.
• Qualifying lease renewals (40 CFR 745.101(d)). A renewal of an existing lease where the lessor already made every disclosure required by 745.107 and no new information described in 745.107 has come into the lessor’s possession. Watch the cross-reference: 745.101(d) points at 745.107, not at 745.113(b); pages that cite 745.113(b) here have followed the wrong thread. If anything new reached you, the exemption is gone.
• Foreclosure sales (40 CFR 745.101(a)). Exempt — but note this is a sales exemption, and it is the one most often misread on rental pages. A purchaser at foreclosure who then leases the pre-1978 property owes the tenant the full disclosure.

This is the part of Illinois lead compliance that confuses people most, and it is genuinely confusing because two separate governments require a booklet and nobody explains that they are satisfied by the same one.

The federal duty. Federal law requires the lessor to give the prospective lessee the EPA pamphlet Protect Your Family From Lead in Your Home before any lease obligation attaches. This is a separate duty from the disclosure form, and failing it is a separate violation supporting independent damages. Handing over a beautifully executed disclosure without the pamphlet is a violation.

The Illinois duty. 410 ILCS 45/9.1 independently requires owners of pre-1978 dwelling units to give prospective lessees “a copy of an informational brochure prepared by the Department”, meaning IDPH, and specifies that it be consistent with 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart F.

How they fit together. IDPH satisfies its own statutory requirement by distributing the EPA booklet — Protect Your Family From Lead in Your Home is published by IDPH on its own site for exactly this purpose. So in practice a single delivery discharges both duties. But do not let that convenience mislead you: they remain two distinct legal duties with two distinct enforcement regimes. Fail to hand over the booklet and you have breached the federal rule (civil penalty, treble damages) and the Illinois Act (Class A misdemeanor) in one omission.

Where to get it. The pamphlet is published jointly by EPA, HUD, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission and is free at epa.gov/lead; IDPH hosts a copy at dph.illinois.gov. It is available in English, Spanish, and additional languages. EPA refreshed the pamphlet in recent years — deliver the current edition rather than a decade-old PDF sitting in your templates folder.

Language. The disclosure must be provided in the language of the contract. An English lease takes the English pamphlet; a Spanish lease takes the Spanish edition. Landlords marketing to non-English-speaking tenants should match the pamphlet to the lease language, not to the conversation. In Illinois this is not a hypothetical: Chicago and its inner suburbs have very large Spanish-speaking and Polish-speaking renter populations concentrated in exactly the pre-1978 stock the rule covers.

Delivery. Hand delivery with the lessee initialing receipt is the gold standard. Electronic delivery is permitted subject to the E-SIGN conditions covered below. What does not satisfy either rule is pointing at a website: posting a link is not delivery. The booklet must be transmitted as a complete document, on paper or electronically.

Existing tenants. The federal leasing disclosure duty attaches to new leases, not to sitting tenants mid-term. Two important exceptions apply in Illinois. First, the renovation rule: if you disturb paint in an occupied pre-1978 unit, the occupants must receive lead hazard information regardless of when their lease started. Second, in suburban Cook County the local ordinance reaches current lessees as well as prospective ones. Both are covered below.

Not proactively. The federal rule does not require you to test for lead, and it does not require you to remove it. EPA states this plainly: the disclosure rule does not require sellers or landlords to test or remove lead-based paint or lead-based paint hazards, and it does not cancel leasing or sales contracts. It is a disclosure rule, not an abatement rule. Illinois imposes no general testing mandate on landlords either.

The standard is actual knowledge, not constructive knowledge and not a duty to investigate. If the unit has never been tested and you hold no reports, “no knowledge” is the honest, lawful answer, and checking it exposes you to nothing.

The trap is the opposite direction. “No knowledge” becomes fraud when you actually know something:

• You hold a risk assessment, inspection report, or abatement record for the unit or the building.
• A previous tenant’s child had an elevated blood-lead result traced to the unit.
• A code-enforcement notice, insurance report, or contractor flagged deteriorated paint.
• IDPH or a delegate agency has served you a mitigation notice.
• You know the property was tested and the report is inconvenient, so you never collected it.

Note the asymmetry the federal rule creates. Testing is optional; disclosing is not. A landlord who tests and finds lead must disclose it, and many owners conclude — rationally — that they would rather not know. That is lawful. What is not lawful is knowing and papering over it, because 42 U.S.C. 4852d(b)(3) attaches its treble-damages remedy to knowing violations, and a fact-finder deciding what you knew will look at every document in your file.

The Illinois back end. Here is where the “I would rather not know” strategy runs out of road in Illinois. Under 410 ILCS 45/8, IDPH or a delegate agency may inspect a dwelling unit occupied, or previously occupied, by a person with an elevated blood lead level. You do not control that trigger — a paediatrician’s blood test does. If that inspection finds a lead hazard, Section 9 starts a mitigation clock you cannot opt out of, and Section 9.1 can take the unit off the rental market until you finish. Illinois does not make you look; it makes the consequences of what is found non-negotiable.

This is the most widespread error on the lead-disclosure internet, and it is worth being precise about, because form vendors routinely bolt a “10-day inspection opportunity” checkbox onto rental disclosures — and some pre-tick it on the landlord’s behalf, which manufactures a tenant acknowledgment of a right that does not exist.

Read the regulation. 40 CFR 745.110(a) provides that before a purchaser is obligated under any contract to purchase target housing, the seller shall permit the purchaser a 10-day period (unless the parties mutually agree, in writing, upon a different period of time) to conduct a risk assessment or inspection for the presence of lead-based paint and/or lead-based paint hazards. Purchaser. Seller. Purchase. Every operative noun is a sales noun. The statute behind it, 42 U.S.C. 4852d(a)(1)(C), is written the same way: the duty is to permit the purchaser a 10-day period.

Now read the lessor rules. 40 CFR 745.113(b) — the six elements listed earlier — contains no inspection-opportunity item. Neither does the EPA lessor disclosure form. EPA’s own fact sheet lists the duty as “provide homebuyers 10 days to conduct a lead-based paint inspection or risk assessment”, and the word is homebuyers.

Where the error comes from. It is not invented from nothing. 40 CFR 745.113(a)(5) — the sales disclosure provision — requires a statement that the purchaser has received the 10-day opportunity or waived it. Form vendors build one template, copy the sales items across to the lease version, and the received-or-waived line rides along. That is the whole mechanism behind the most repeated error in this field.

And Illinois adds nothing here. 410 ILCS 45 creates no tenant inspection window either. There is no Illinois analogue to 745.110. If you are looking for an Illinois rule giving tenants 10 days to inspect, there is not one to find.

What this means for you. An Illinois landlord owes a prospective tenant no statutory inspection window. You may offer one voluntarily, and doing so is a reasonable gesture for a tenant who asks — but do not describe it as a federal or state right, and do not put a checkbox on your disclosure asserting the tenant received or waived a right the rule never gave them. A form that documents a fictitious waiver is worse than one that stays silent: it is an inaccurate statement on a document every party signs certifying accuracy.

Complete the fields below to generate a federally compliant Illinois lead paint disclosure. The generated PDF reproduces the lead warning statement, the lessor’s disclosure items, the lessee’s acknowledgment items, the agent’s acknowledgment, and the certification of accuracy with signature and date lines for each party.

Everything above concerns the paperwork you deliver at the start of a tenancy. This section concerns what Illinois does when a hazard actually surfaces — the part of the law competing pages skip, and the part with the sharpest teeth.

How it starts: 410 ILCS 45/8

You rarely choose this moment. Under 410 ILCS 45/8, IDPH or a delegate agency may inspect a dwelling unit occupied, or previously occupied, by a person with an elevated blood lead level. The usual sequence is that a child is screened, the result is elevated, the local health department works backwards to the housing, and an inspector arrives. Section 8.2 supplies warrant procedures where access is refused, and Section 8.3 allows stop work orders. Inspections are performed by licensed lead inspectors and risk assessors under Section 8.1.

The mitigation notice and the clock: 410 ILCS 45/9

If a lead hazard is found, “the Department or delegate agency shall serve a mitigation notice on the property owner that the owner is required to mitigate the lead hazard”. The deadline then turns on two alternative triggers — why the unit was inspected, and who lives there. Either one is enough to put you on the 30-day clock:

The certificate of compliance is the document that matters. It is what lifts the Section 9.1 new-lease bar, and it is what ends the Section 9.1 renewal-disclosure duty. Until you hold it, the hazard is legally “previously identified” and unresolved.

Posting: 410 ILCS 45/9.4

An owner who receives a mitigation notice must post notice at the building. Section 9.4 requires owners receiving mitigation notices to “post notices at all entrances to the regulated facility specifying the identified lead hazards.” Note the scope: all entrances to the facility, not just the door of the affected unit. In a multi-unit Illinois building this is a public, visible obligation, and it is one every prospective tenant and neighbour will see.

Enforcement, rent withholding, and the eviction shield: 410 ILCS 45/10

Section 10 is short and unusually pointed. Violations are reported to the State’s Attorney, who may charge the owner with a Class A misdemeanor and who “shall take additional measures to ensure that rent is withheld from the owner by the occupants of the dwelling units affected, until the mitigation requirements under Section 9 of this Act are complied with.”

Then it protects the tenant: “No tenant shall be evicted because rent is withheld under the provisions of this Act, or because of any action required of the owner of the regulated facility as a result of enforcement of this Act.”

Read those two sentences together and the Illinois posture is clear. The federal rule’s remedy for non-disclosure is money after the fact. The Illinois Act’s remedy is to turn off the rent and protect the tenant from retaliation while the hazard is fixed. There is no federal analogue to this. If a mitigation notice is outstanding on your Illinois unit, the statute contemplates you collecting nothing from it and being unable to evict over the shortfall — while also being barred from signing a new lease with anyone else. For a landlord, that combination is the whole argument for mitigating quickly. Because enforcement can also intersect with an eviction you are already running, our Illinois eviction notice laws guide covers the notice mechanics that a rent-withholding dispute will inevitably raise.

40 CFR 745.113(c) requires the lessor to retain a copy of the completed disclosure for no less than three years from the commencement date of the leasing period. That is the entire federal retention requirement, and it is also the single highest-leverage thing in this whole guide, because the signed disclosure is the only artefact that proves you complied.

Think about how a lead dispute actually unfolds. A tenant alleges no disclosure. There is no agency database to consult; nothing gets filed anywhere. The dispute reduces to whether you can produce a signed document. If you can, the claim usually ends. If you cannot, you are defending a knowing-violation allegation with your word against theirs, and the statute puts treble damages and fee-shifting on the other side of that argument.

What belongs in the file:

• The executed disclosure with every party’s initials, signatures, and dates.
• A note identifying which brochure edition was delivered, and how.
• Copies of every record and report you handed to the lessee.
• The lease itself, if the disclosure was inserted rather than attached.
• For electronic delivery: the consent record and the delivery/access log.
• In Illinois: any IDPH mitigation notice, inspection report, mitigation plan, and — above all — the certificate of compliance. That certificate is what proves you were entitled to sign the new lease.

The rule itself