Free Lead-Based Paint Disclosure Form

A lead-based 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). The duty is federal and uniform — it applies identically in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the territories. It is one of the disclosures that belongs in every pre-1978 tenancy file, alongside the rest of your lease paperwork — see our guide to writing a lease agreement for where it fits. Generate the form below, then read on for exactly what the rule requires and, just as importantly, what it does not.

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Federal 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 a 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 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. The 10-day risk assessment or inspection opportunity is a sales requirement. It does not apply to leases. This is the single most consequential error circulating on lead-disclosure forms, and it is worth reading the actual text rather than trusting any summary — including ours.

Read the statute. 42 U.S.C. 4852d(a)(1)(C) requires the regulations to ensure that, before a purchaser or lessee is obligated, the seller or lessor does certain things — and subparagraph (C) specifically directs that the seller “permit the purchaser a 10-day period (unless the parties mutually agree upon a different period of time) to conduct a risk assessment or inspection”. The 10-day opportunity is granted to the purchaser. Lessees get the disclosure duties; they do not get an inspection period.

Read the regulation. 40 CFR 745.110(a) provides, verbatim: “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. Purchase. Seller. Every operative noun in that sentence is a sales noun. There is no lessee, lessor, or lease anywhere in it.

Now read the lessor rules. 40 CFR 745.113(b) — the six elements set out in the next section — contains no inspection-opportunity item whatsoever. It requires a warning statement, a knowledge disclosure, a records list, a lessee acknowledgment, an agent statement, and signatures. That is the complete list. Neither does the EPA lessor disclosure form include one. EPA’s own guidance consistently describes the duty as providing homebuyers a 10-day period, and EPA states separately that the Disclosure Rule does not require landlords to conduct or pay for inspections.

What this means for you. A landlord owes a prospective tenant no statutory inspection window. You may offer one voluntarily. If a prospective tenant with a young child asks for time to have the unit assessed, allowing it is a reasonable and often sensible gesture — but it is optional best practice, not law. Describe it that way in your own paperwork, and never as a federal right.

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, and it does not make you fix anything.

“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? The Consumer Product Safety Commission banned lead-based paint in residential consumer products effective 1 January 1978 (16 CFR 1303.1). Housing built after that date is presumed free of lead-based paint and sits outside the disclosure regime entirely. The date is not a policy judgment about risk; it is simply the date the paint stopped being sold.

How to verify the build year. The county assessor or property appraiser record is the fastest authoritative source, and nearly every county in the country publishes it 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, and it is the single most common reason a landlord who genuinely believed they were exempt turns out not to be.

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.

Where the exposure concentrates. Pre-1978 stock is not evenly distributed. It clusters in the older housing markets of the Northeast and Midwest and in the historic urban cores everywhere else, while most Sun Belt suburban development postdates the trigger. Portfolio landlords with mixed-vintage holdings are the ones who get caught, because the compliance answer differs unit by unit and a single office policy cannot be right for all of them. When in doubt, verify against the assessor record rather than relying on an impression of the neighbourhood.

Even pre-1978 property can fall outside the rule. The exclusions are narrow, and two of them — the zero-bedroom exclusion and housing for the elderly or persons with disabilities — evaporate the moment a young child is in the picture. That the zero-bedroom limb now carries the same child-under-six condition is the single most misreported point on this topic, because it changed only with the 2025 amendment to 40 CFR 745.103 and older charts still show a studio as categorically exempt. Verify against the current rule text before relying on any of them.

• Housing built in 1978 or later. Not target housing at all.
• Zero-bedroom units (40 CFR 745.103, definitional) — efficiencies, studio apartments, dormitory housing, military barracks, and rentals of individual rooms, in which the living area is not separated from the sleeping area — unless a child under six resides or is expected to reside there. Under 40 CFR 745.103 as amended effective January 13, 2025 (89 FR 89416), this exclusion now carries the same child-under-six condition as the elderly/disabled limb, so a studio leased to a family with a young child is target housing and needs the disclosure. The exclusion was unconditional before the 2025 amendment, and older charts and competitor pages still show a studio as categorically exempt — which is why this is the most misread point on the topic.
• Leases of 100 days or less with no possibility of renewal or extension. Vacation and short-term rentals typically qualify; a month-to-month tenancy does not, because it renews.
• Housing for the elderly or persons with disabilities, where the housing is specifically designated as such — unless a child under six lives or is expected to live there.
• Certified lead-free housing. Property in which all painted surfaces have been tested by a certified inspector and found free of lead-based paint. Retain the certification; it is the only proof of the exemption.
• Foreclosure sales. A sale in foreclosure is exempt — but this is a sales exemption. A purchaser at foreclosure who then leases the pre-1978 property owes the full disclosure to the tenant.

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. EPA maintains a dedicated guidance page on exactly this question, and the answer is that you do not owe the pamphlet to a tenant already under lease. 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.

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.
• 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.

Complete the fields below to generate a federally compliant lead-based paint disclosure for a rental in any state. 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 — the six elements of 40 CFR 745.113(b), and nothing else.

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 under the federal rule. 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.

Practical retention advice. Three years is a floor, not a target. State limitation periods for the underlying claims routinely run longer than three years, and a lead-poisoning claim brought on behalf of a minor can surface many years after the tenancy ends — in many states the clock does not even start until the child reaches majority. 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 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. Where the renovation affects an occupied pre-1978 unit, the occupants must receive lead hazard information no more than 60 days before work begins — the EPA renovation pamphlet, delivered to the tenants in the unit. This duty runs to sitting tenants who already have a lease and already received their leasing disclosure years ago.

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.

Why it catches good landlords. 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 worth thinking about: 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” permanently unavailable to you going forward. Entering an occupied unit to do that work is also its own compliance question under your state’s entry-notice statute.

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. In researching the pages currently ranking for this term we found three different figures on three different sites, none of which said which agency or which year they came from. 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.

What a violation does not do. It does not void the lease. You will read that non-disclosure can “void the lease agreement” — it is a myth, and EPA says the opposite: the rule does not cancel leasing or sales contracts. The remedy for a disclosure failure is damages and penalties, not rescission of the tenancy. A tenant cannot walk away from an otherwise valid lease because the lead form was missing; they can sue for treble damages and make you pay their lawyer.

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.

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.

Where violations get reported. Tenants can report a disclosure violation to EPA at epa.gov/lead/violation or to HUD at the lead regulations mailbox published on HUD’s enforcement 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.

The federal disclosure duty is a floor that applies in all 50 states. No state law removes it, and no state form substitutes for it. What varies is whether your state or city stacks additional duties on top — and in most states, the answer is that it does not. The federal rule is the whole of the disclosure obligation for the majority of American landlords — our Florida lead paint disclosure page is a worked example of a state that adds nothing at all on this subject.

Where states do add requirements, they tend to fall into four categories. Knowing which category you are in tells you what to go looking for.

Massachusetts is the most demanding regime in the country. The Massachusetts Lead Law requires the owner to remove or cover lead paint hazards in units where a child under six lives, rather than simply disclosing them, and Massachusetts imposes strict liability — an owner can be liable for a child’s lead poisoning without any proof of negligence. A Massachusetts landlord who has satisfied the federal disclosure has satisfied only the beginning of their obligations — our Massachusetts landlord-tenant laws guide covers the surrounding s