Free Indiana Lead Paint Disclosure

An Indiana 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 EPA pamphlet Protect Your Family From Lead in Your Home, captures any agent’s acknowledgment, and is signed and dated by every party. 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). Indiana imposes no separate lead paint disclosure statute — the duty here is purely federal. What Indiana does add is an independent habitability duty under IC 32-31-8-5 for deteriorated paint, covered in our Indiana habitability laws guide. Generate the form below, then read on for exactly what the rule requires.

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Indiana 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 Indiana 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 EPA pamphlet. The signed acknowledgment is the landlord’s primary defence in any later EPA or HUD inquiry or private civil action.

The disclosure is not optional and the duty is not waivable by agreement. A pre-1978 Indiana 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.

No. Indiana has no state lead paint disclosure statute, no state disclosure form, no lead registry, no landlord certification requirement, and no state tenant-notice duty — and this page will not invent one. Every substantive requirement described here comes from federal law: 42 U.S.C. 4852d, 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart F, and 24 CFR Part 35 Subpart A.

That plain answer is worth stating because the competing pages will not state it. The most common formulation you will meet is that Indiana “closely mirrors federal requirements but introduces notable distinctions” — followed by no distinction, no statute number, and no citation. If you are searching for the Indiana lead disclosure statute, there is not one to find, and the reason no page names it is that it does not exist.

Indiana does have two lead statutes. Neither is a landlord disclosure duty, and conflating them with one is the single most common error on this topic:

• IC 16-41-39.8 — Lead-Based Paint Activities. A licensing chapter. IC 16-41-39.8-3 requires a person who engages in lead-based paint activities to hold a licence, in the disciplines of inspector, risk assessor, project designer, supervisor, abatement worker, and contractor, plus a separate clearance examiner licence. It regulates who may do the work. It says nothing about what a landlord must hand a tenant at lease signing. Its administrative counterpart is 410 IAC 32, which the Indiana Department of Health requires licensed abatement contractors to attest they have read alongside 40 CFR 745.
• IC 16-41-39.4 — Childhood Lead Poisoning. A public-health surveillance chapter. It directs the state department to track lead poisoning, maintain a database, coordinate with local health departments, and educate providers, and it obliges persons who examine blood to report results. The duties fall on the health department and on laboratories and physicians. A landlord is not a duty-holder under it.

Indiana’s lead chapter expressly declines to require abatement. IC 16-41-39.8-1(b) provides that the chapter “may not be construed as requiring the abatement of lead-based paint hazards in a child occupied facility or target housing.” That sentence is the clearest available answer to the question Indiana landlords actually ask, which is whether the state will make them remove lead paint. It will not. Removing lead is not a state mandate; disclosing what you know is a federal one.

What Indiana genuinely contributes is three adjacent things worth knowing:

• Habitability — IC 32-31-8-5. The landlord’s duty to deliver the premises in a safe, clean, and habitable condition, to comply with all health and housing codes, and to maintain the building’s core systems applies independently of disclosure. Deteriorated paint can be a habitability defect on its own. Notably, the statute never uses the word “lead” — the duty attaches to the condition, not the substance. Covered in full below.
• The only statutory rental disclosure Indiana does impose — IC 32-31-3-18. A landlord must disclose in writing, at or before the start of the rental agreement, the names and addresses of an Indiana-resident person authorised to manage the unit and an Indiana-resident agent for service of process. That is Indiana’s rental disclosure duty. It is about identity, not lead.
• Local programmes. Some Indiana cities and counties run lead-safe housing, rental-registration, or health-department programmes that can add inspection or notice obligations. These are municipal, not statewide, and a city ordinance is not state law. Check with local code enforcement or your county health department before assuming none applies.

Because the obligation is federal rather than state-specific, the same disclosure applies to a rental in any state — our federal lead-based paint disclosure form is the generic version of the Indiana 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 rule is an information-transfer rule. It makes you tell the truth about what you know and hand over what you hold; it does not make you go looking.

“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 Indiana. The county assessor’s record is the fastest authoritative source, and most Indiana counties publish parcel data through the Beacon and Gateway portals; Marion County records are searchable through the assessor’s own property system. 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.

Indiana context. Indiana’s housing stock skews old by national standards, and its pre-1978 concentration is heavy in the older urban cores — the Indianapolis near-east and near-west sides, Gary, East Chicago, South Bend, Fort Wayne, Evansville, Terre Haute, and Muncie. Lake County in particular carries both aged housing and a long-running lead-exposure history, which is why several Indiana county health departments run their own childhood blood-lead testing clinics. For a landlord this means the exemption is the exception, not the rule: in much of Indiana’s rental stock the pre-1978 answer is simply yes. Portfolio owners 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 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.
• 0-bedroom dwellings (40 CFR 745.103, definitional). A dwelling in which the living area is not separated from the sleeping area. The rule’s own definition says the term includes efficiencies, studio apartments, dormitory housing, military barracks, and rentals of individual rooms in residential dwellings. Since the 2025 amendment this exclusion is conditional — it is withdrawn where a child under six resides or is expected to reside there; see the callout below, because most exemption lists still show the old unconditional version.
• 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. Since the 2025 amendment the 0-bedroom exclusion above carries the same child condition.
• 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 has previously disclosed all information required under 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.

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.

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. 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.

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 the rule is pointing at a website: posting a link is not delivery. The pamphlet must be transmitted as a complete document, on paper or electronically.

Existing tenants. The leasing disclosure duty attaches to new leases, not to sitting tenants mid-term. There is one important exception, and it is the renovation rule: if you disturb paint in an occupied pre-1978 unit, the occupants must receive the lead hazard information regardless of when their lease started. That is covered in the renovation section below.

The 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.

Indiana law says the same thing from the other direction. IC 16-41-39.8-1(b) provides that Indiana’s lead-based paint activities chapter “may not be construed as requiring the abatement of lead-based paint hazards in a child occupied facility or target housing.” So neither layer of law obliges an Indiana landlord to remove lead paint. Both oblige honesty about what is known.

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. In Indiana this is a live scenario, because IC 16-41-39.4 requires blood-lead results to be reported to the state department, and a county health department follow-up can put the address on your desk in writing.
• A code-enforcement notice, insurance report, or contractor flagged deteriorated paint.
• You know the property was tested and the report is inconvenient, so you never collected it.

Note the asymmetry the 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.

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 scoped the same way.

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. The sales counterpart at 745.113(a)(5) does carry a received-or-waived statement about the 10-day opportunity; the lease provision has no equivalent. That asymmetry is deliberate, and it is where the copying error starts: vendors build one template, then serve it for both transaction types.

What this means for you. An Indiana 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 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 Indiana 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.

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 legal 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, and Indiana maintains no lead disclosure registry to check. 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 pamphlet 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.

The rule itself says the three years is not the measure of your exposure. 40 CFR 745.113(c)(2) provides that the recordkeeping requirement “is not intended to place any limitations on civil suits under the Act, or to otherwise affect a lessee’s or purchaser’s rights under the civil penalty provisions of 42 U.S.C. 4852d(b)(3).” Read that carefully, because it is the sentence that should govern your retention policy: three years is how long you are required to keep the file, not how long you can be sued. The tenant’s treble-damages right is expressly unaffected by the retention clock running out. A landlord who shreds the file on the three-year anniversary has discharged the duty to retain while keeping every bit of the liability that file would have defended.

Practical retention advice. Three years is a floor, not a target. Indiana’s limitation periods for the underlying claims run longer than three years, and a lead-poisoning claim brought on behalf of a minor can surface many years after the tenancy ends. Retention is nearly free; destroy the file on the three-year anniversary and you have optimised for the wrong risk. Keep it for the life of ownership and hand the file over at sale.

Electronic disclosure and e-signature are permitted. The signed electronic disclosure is the same legally binding document as a paper one, under the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, 15 U.S.C. 7001. Almost no competing guide states the conditions EPA attaches, so here they are.

If you provide the required disclosure information electronically, EPA expects you to give the tenant:

• A clear statement of the right to receive paper documents. Electronic delivery is the tenant’s option, not your default imposition.
• The procedure to withdraw consent, and the consequences of withdrawing. Spelled out, not implied.
• How to access and retain the electronic records. A file the tenant cannot open or keep has not been delivered.
• Consent demonstrating they can actually access the materials. You need affirmative consent showing the tenant can receive the forms in the format you are using.

The underlying principle: the use of electronic technology must give the tenant complete access to all disclosure materials. A portal link buried in a welcome email, a PDF the tenant cannot download, or an e-sign flow that shows the signature page without the pamphlet all fail that test even though a signature comes back.

Retention is identical. Three years, same as paper — but electronic records need a real home. An e-signature vendor account you stop paying for is not a retention plan. Export the executed PDF and the audit trail into storage you control.

The disclosure rule governs leasing. A different rule governs work on the building, and Indiana landlords routinely comply with the first while breaching the second.

The RRP rule. The EPA Renovation, Repair and Painting rule at 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart E applies to renovation, repair, or painting that disturbs painted surfaces in pre-1978 target housing. Above the de minimis threshold, the work must be performed by an EPA-certified firm using certified renovators and lead-safe work practices — containment, prohibited practices such as open-flame burning and uncontained power sanding, and cleaning verification. This is not a paperwork rule; it dictates how the work is physically done, and it applies to a landlord’s own maintenance staff, not just outside contractors.

The 60-day information duty, stated in the right direction. Where the renovation affects an occupied pre-1978 unit, the occupants must receive lead hazard information no more than 60 days before work begins. That limit is a maximum, not a minimum. Several guides — and at least one AI-generated summary answering this exact Indiana query — state that tenants must be notified “at least 60 days before” the renovation. That inverts the rule and would have you notifying tenants of work you have not scheduled. The purpose of the ceiling is freshness: information handed over months in advance goes stale and gets lost.

Common areas trigger building-wide notice. If the work affects common areas of a pre-1978 multi-unit building, notice must go to every unit in the building describing the nature and location of the work and the dates it is expected to begin and end. Every unit — not merely the ones adjacent to the work.

Where Indiana law re-enters. The federal RRP rule says how the work is done. Indiana’s IC 16-41-39.8 says who is licensed to do it: inspector, risk assessor, project designer, supervisor, abatement worker, contractor. And IC 16-41-39.8-1(a)(2) carries a carve-out landlords should read closely — the licensing chapter does not apply to a person performing lead-based paint activities in a dwelling they own, unless the dwelling is occupied during the work by someone other than the owner or the owner’s immediate family, or by a child not more than six years of age (or an age specified in rules adopted under section 6 of the chapter) who resides in the building and has been identified as having an elevated blood lead level. Read that against the ordinary landlord fact pattern: your rental is occupied by tenants, who are by definition not your immediate family. The carve-out that protects an owner-occupier renovating their own home does not protect a landlord renovating around a sitting tenant.

Note also that entering an occupied unit to carry out that work is its own compliance question — see our Indiana landlord entry laws guide for the notice a landlord owes before entering to renovate.

Why it matters in Indiana. Indiana’s older urban stock turns over and gets refreshed constantly, and repainting between tenancies is the most routine task in the business. Scraping and repainting a 1958 duplex’s window trim with in-house staff and no certification is an RRP violation with its own penalty exposure, entirely independent of a flawless leasing disclosure. And there is a second-order effect: work that disturbs paint can create the very hazard you then have to disclose to the next tenant, and it can generate the records that make “no knowledge” unavailable to you going forward.

Search this topic and you will be told the penalty is a specific number per violation. You will see several different numbers, none dated, most copied from an old page. Here is the accurate structure, which has two entirely separate limbs.

Limb one: the tenant’s private action, 42 U.S.C. 4852d(b)(3). Any person who knowingly violates the section is jointly and severally liable to the purchaser or lessee for three times the amount of damages that person incurred. This multiplier is written into the statute; it does not move with inflation. Section 4852d(b)(4) adds that a court may award court costs together with reasonable attorney fees and expert witness fees to a prevailing plaintiff. The fee-shifting is what makes small disclosure violations economically worth suing over.

Limb two: government civil money penalties. These are assessed by EPA and HUD, and they are inflation-adjusted — annually, under the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act, with the operative amounts published in the table at 40 CFR 19.4 for EPA-assessed penalties. Knowing violations can also carry criminal exposure.

The asymmetry is what should drive behaviour. Completing this form correctly costs fifteen minutes. The downside is a treble-damages judgment with the tenant’s legal fees attached, plus an agency penalty, plus — if a child was actually poisoned — a tort claim in which the disclosure violation supplies a ready-made negligence theory.

EPA and HUD share enforcement of the disclosure rule. EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics and HUD’s Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes run the programme jointly, and enforcement has historically concentrated on larger landlords and property managers, where a single practice failure replicates across hundreds of tenancies and produces a large per-violation multiplier. Note who is not on that list: no Indiana state agency enforces the disclosure rule, because Indiana has no disclosure rule to enforce.

How a case starts. Rarely with an inspector at the door. Usually one of four ways: a tenant reports a missing disclosure; a child’s elevated blood-lead result triggers a health-department investigation that works backwards to the paperwork; a private lawsuit’s discovery exposes a systemic gap; or an agency initiative targets a market and requests files from a portfolio owner.

The second route deserves particular attention in Indiana. Under IC 16-41-39.4, blood-lead examination results are reported to the state department, which coordinates follow-up with local health departments; several Indiana counties, including Lake, Elkhart, and LaGrange, run their own childhood testing clinics. A positive result generates an environmental investigation that starts at the child’s address. If that address is your rental, the question of what you disclosed and when arrives from a direction you were not watching — not from EPA, but from a county nurse.

Where violations get reported. Tenants can report a disclosure violation to EPA or to HUD through the enforcement contacts published on their lead pages. The National Lead Information Center, 1-800-424-LEAD, fields questions from both landlords and tenants. Nothing about the process requires the tenant to hire a lawyer first, which is precisely why a clean file matters more than a good argument.

What an inquiry asks for. Signed disclosures for the tenancies in scope, proof of pamphlet delivery, and the records you disclosed or certified you did not have. That is it. An owner who can produce the file usually ends the matter at the document-request stage; an owner who cannot is negotiating over the size of the penalty, not whether there is one.

Federal disclosure is the compliance floor, not the whole picture. Indiana habitability law applies independently to the underlying condition of the paint — and unlike the disclosure duty, this one really is Indiana law.

IC 32-31-8-5 requires a landlord to deliver the rental premises to a tenant in compliance with the rental agreement and in a safe, clean, and habitable condition, to comply with all health and housing codes applicable to the premises, to make all reasonable efforts to keep common areas clean and proper, and to provide and maintain the electrical, plumbing, sanitary, heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems, elevators, and supplied appliances in good and safe working condition. Deteriorated lead-based paint — peeling, chipping, chalking, cracking, or damaged — can rise to a habitability defect on that footing, and the health-and-housing-codes limb picks up any local code addressing lead hazards.

Read the whole chapter, not just section 5. Almost every competing page that cites IC 32-31-8-5 cites it alone. Three neighbouring sections change the answer in practice:

• IC 32-31-8-1 — the applicability limit. The chapter applies only to dwelling units let for rent under a rental agreement entered into after 30 June 2002, and it does not apply to units let with an option to purchase under an agreement entered into before 1 July 2008. An older arrangement is outside the chapter entirely.
• IC 32-31-8-4 — no contracting out. A waiver of the chapter’s application by a landlord or tenant, by contract or otherwise, is void. A lease clause disclaiming the habitability duty is worth nothing.
• IC 32-31-8-6 — the notice gate on tenant suits. A tenant may enforce the landlord’s obligations in court, but may not bring the action unless they first gave the landlord notice of the noncompliance, allowed a reasonable time to repair or remedy, and the landlord then failed or refused. A prevailing tenant may recover actual and consequential damages, attorney’s fees and court costs, and injunctive relief. Liability for damages begins when the landlord has notice or actual knowledge and has refused, or failed within a reasonable time, to remedy.

For a landlord the practical reading of section 6 is counter-intuitive: a tenant’s written complaint about peeling paint is not a nuisance to be filed away, it is the event that starts your damages clock. Fix it inside a reasonable time and the section forecloses the claim. Ignore it and the same section funds the tenant’s lawyer.

The distinction landlords miss: disclosure and habitability are independent. Disclosing a hazard does not licence you to leave it in place. A perfectly executed disclosure that says “known lead-based paint present, peeling in the second bedroom” is a complete defence to a disclosure claim and simultaneously a written admission in a habitability claim. Deteriorated paint in a pre-1978 Indiana unit should be remediated by a licensed firm before re-rental — both to comply with the RRP rule and to remove the habitability exposure that disclosure does nothing to cure. Our Indiana habitability laws guide covers the condition-based duties in full.

The federal Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. 3601 et seq., adds one more edge. It prohibits familial-status discrimination, and a landlord who steers families with young children away from pre-1978 units to dodge lead obligations has swapped a disclosure problem for a fair-housing complaint — a considerably worse trade. See our Indiana tenant screening laws guide for where screening practice and familial status intersect.

Skipping disclosure on a pre-1978 unit

The most common violation, and the one with the worst risk-to-effort ratio. There is no penalty for over-disclosing and a severe one for guessing wrong. When the build year is uncertain, deliver the form.

Believing there is an Indiana lead statute to comply with

There is not, and looking for one wastes time that should go into the federal file. Worse is the inverse error: assuming that because Indiana imposes no disclosure duty, no duty exists. The federal rule applies in Indiana with full force, and it is the only one that does.

Mistaking the licensing chapter for a disclosure duty

IC 16-41-39.8 licenses inspectors, risk assessors, supervisors, abatement workers, and contractors. It governs who may perform lead work. It does not tell you what to hand a tenant, and holding no licence does not excuse a missing disclosure.

Delivering it at signing instead of before

The disclosure must be delivered before the lessee is obligated under the lease. A disclosure produced with the lease packet at the signing table, signed in the same motion as the lease, does not give the tenant the pre-obligation information the rule exists to provide. Send it in advance and let the tenant read it.

Wrong build-year assumption

“Around 1980” is not a defence. The county assessor record, permit file, or certificate of occupancy establishes it. A 1976 building renovated in 1985 is still target housing.

Failing to provide the EPA pamphlet

The form alone is not compliance. The pamphlet is a distinct requirement and a distinct violation, and substituting your own lead handout does not satisfy it.

Verbal or implied disclosure

Disclosure must be written, signed, and retained. Conversations, text messages, and oral assurances do not satisfy 40 CFR 745.113 — and cannot be produced three years later when an inquiry asks for the file.

Rewriting the lead warning statement

The language at 40 CFR 745.113(b)(1) is prescribed. Tightening it, modernising it, or folding it into your lease’s own warranty language can defeat the disclosure. Reproduce it as written.

Pre-ticking the tenant’s acknowledgments

A landlord cannot acknowledge, on the tenant’s behalf, that the tenant received the pamphlet. Forms that invite you to do this create a false statement on a document certified for accuracy by every signatory. The acknowledgment items belong to the lessee and are completed by the lessee.

Printing a 10-day inspection line on a lease disclosure

It does not belong there. The window is a sales rule, and a waiver line for a right the tenant never had is an inaccurate statement on a certified document.

Treating “no knowledge” as a place to hide

Honest when nothing is known; fraud when something is. A landlord aware of prior peeling paint, a prior report, or a child’s elevated blood-lead result cannot check “no knowledge” and expect it to hold.

Failing to disclose to every lessee

If multiple tenants sign the lease, each must receive the disclosure and pamphlet and each must sign the acknowledgment. One signature on a four-tenant lease leaves three undisclosed tenancies.

Forgetting the records for the rest of the building

A building-wide evaluation covering common areas or other units is disclosable to this tenant. Owners routinely disclose the unit-specific file and sit on the building report.

Renovating without the RRP rule

Compliance with the leasing disclosure says nothing about compliance when your maintenance crew sands pre-1978 window trim. Separate rule, separate certification, separate penalty — and in Indiana, a separate licensing question under IC 16-41-39.8.

Tenants of Indiana pre-1978 rentals hold meaningful rights under federal and state law. Landlords benefit from understanding them, because they define the consequences of a defective form.

The right to the disclosure before being obligated

Delivery must precede the lessee’s obligation under the lease. A disclosure produced afterwards does not satisfy 40 CFR 745.113, and the timing violation stands on its own even where the substance was accurate.

The right to the EPA pamphlet

Independent of the form. Non-delivery is a separate violation supporting separate damages.

The right to triple damages plus fees

Under 42 U.S.C. 4852d(b)(3) a tenant injured by a knowing violation recovers three times actual damages, and under (b)(4) the court may add costs, reasonable attorney fees, and expert witness fees. The knowing standard is broad enough to reach reckless disregard.

The right to report to EPA or HUD

Tenants may report violations to either agency without filing suit. Agency action can bring civil penalties, consent decrees, injunctive relief, and ongoing compliance monitoring across a portfolio.

The right to a habitable unit (Indiana-specific)

Independent of disclosure, IC 32-31-8-5 entitles Indiana tenants to a safe, clean, and habitable unit. Deteriorated lead paint can support a habitability action or a defence. The right comes with a procedural condition tenants should know: under IC 32-31-8-6 the tenant must give the landlord notice and a reasonable time to remedy before suing, and under IC 32-31-8-1 the chapter reaches only rental agreements entered into after 30 June 2002.

The right to have the tenancy’s paperwork duty fall on the landlord

The disclosure obligation is the lessor’s, and IC 32-31-8-4 makes any attempted waiver of the habitability chapter void. A tenant does not lose these protections by signing a lease that purports to disclaim them.

The right to tort damages for actual exposure

Where a child or pregnant tenant suffers lead exposure, ordinary tort remedies apply — medical costs, pain and suffering, future treatment, and lost earning capacity. A disclosure violation supplies a ready foundation for a negligence theory, which is why the paperwork failure and the injury claim tend to arrive together.

The right to fair-housing protection

The Fair Housing Act prohibits familial-status discrimination. Avoiding families with young children to sidestep lead obligations is itself actionable.

The bottom line for landlords. Compliance is cheap and mechanical. The failure mode is a treble-damages judgment with the tenant’s fees attached, an agency penalty that rises every January, and — in the worst case — a poisoned child and a tort claim your own file helps prove. The form above handles the mechanics; the rest of this page is what the form cannot do for you.

Published by Tenant Screening Background Check

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