Free Maine Abandoned Property Notice
Maine’s procedure runs on one date: the day the notice is sent. 14 M.R.S. § 6013 gives the tenant 7 days from that sending to claim, requires storage to continue at least 14 days after the same sending if they do, and demands an itemized list of the items and containers of items where the tenant has already gone.
Maine is one of the states that actually answers the question. 14 M.R.S. § 6013, captioned “Property unclaimed by tenant,” supplies a complete procedure — a storage standard, a notice, a claim window, an extension, a sale power, a proceeds waterfall and a waiver rule — and its opening sentence covers both endings at once: “Any personal property that remains in a rental unit after entry of judgment in favor of the landlord or that is abandoned or unclaimed by a tenant following the tenant’s vacating the rental unit must be disposed of as follows.” What trips readers up is not the existence of the rule but its arithmetic and its ending. Both periods run from the same event, and the money left over at the end does not go where almost everyone expects. Everything below comes from the section itself as published by the Maine Revisor of Statutes.
Build your Maine notice of abandoned property
Fill in the fields below and the generator produces a dated notice of abandoned property you can print, sign, serve and keep a copy of. Nothing is stored and there is no charge. Fields you leave blank print as a dash so you can complete them by hand.
The seven and the fourteen run from the same day — it is not seven plus fourteen
This is the single easiest thing to get wrong about Maine, and it is an error a reader would act on. § 6013(3) gives the tenant a claim window: “If the tenant claims the property within 7 days after the notice under subsection 2 is sent, the landlord shall release the property to the tenant…” § 6013(4) then extends the storage duty: “If the tenant responds to the notice sent pursuant to subsection 2, the landlord shall continue to store the property for at least 14 days after the landlord sent the notice.” Read the two anchors. The seven days run from the sending of the notice. The fourteen days run from the sending of the notice as well — not from the claim, not from the expiry of the seven days, and not from anything the tenant does. So a tenant who claims on day six does not get twenty-one days; the total is fourteen days from the notice, and only eight of them remain. A page that describes Maine as “seven days, then another fourteen” overstates the storage obligation by a full week, which is the kind of error that leads a landlord to hold goods they could have dealt with or a tenant to arrive after the door has closed.
Watch: Free Maine Abandoned Property Notice — Fillable PDF explained
Maine abandoned property procedure at a glance
How long must a Maine landlord store abandoned property
7 days to claim from the sending of the notice; if claimed, at least 14 days from that same sending
Is that seven days and then another fourteen
No. Both run from the sending of the notice — fourteen days total, not twenty-one
Who gets the surplus after a sale
The Treasurer of State — § 6013(5)(D)(2), not the tenant
How must the notice be sent
First-class mail with proof of mailing — expressly not certified mail
Where the money goes, quoted in full
§ 6013(5)(D) sets out what a landlord may do “with regard to any property that remains unclaimed by the tenant in accordance with this subsection,” and paragraph (2) is the one that inverts the usual assumption: “Sell any property for a reasonable fair market price and apply all proceeds to rental arrearages, damages and costs of storage and sale. All remaining balances must be forwarded to the Treasurer of State.” Three things sit inside that sentence. The price standard is “a reasonable fair market price” — not “commercially reasonable,” not a public auction, with no advertising and no notice-of-sale requirement anywhere in the section. The deductions are a closed list of four: rental arrearages, damages, costs of storage, costs of sale. And the surplus goes to the State. It is not paid to the tenant, it is not held for the tenant by the landlord, and it is not kept. How a landlord actually remits it — the form, the deadline, any reporting duty — is not described here, because that sits in Maine’s unclaimed property act, which was not read for this page.
How 14 M.R.S. § 6013 works, step by step
Put the property into safe, dry, secured storage
§ 6013(1): “The landlord shall place in storage in a safe, dry, secured location any personal property that is abandoned or unclaimed by a tenant following the tenant’s vacating the rental unit.” Three adjectives, all mandatory. The statute does not name a place, does not require a commercial facility and does not require on-site storage — but “reasonable care” is not the standard it chose.
Send the notice — and note that you may send it immediately
§ 6013(2): notice “may be sent at any time after entry of judgment in favor of the landlord or after the tenant has vacated the rental unit.” There is no waiting period before the notice. Delivery is first-class mail with proof of mailing on both paragraphs — not certified mail, and not bare first-class either.
Use the right paragraph for the situation, because the contents differ
If the tenant is still in possession, paragraph (A) sends the notice to the address of the rental unit, and the claim period may not be limited to less than the longer of seven days from mailing or forty-eight hours after service of the writ. If the tenant has vacated, paragraph (B) sends it to the last known address and it must include an itemized list of the items and containers of items, plus a warning that the landlord may dispose of the property if the tenant does not respond within seven days.
Release it free of charge if the claim comes inside seven days
§ 6013(3): where the tenant claims within seven days of the sending, the landlord “shall release the property to the tenant and may not condition release … upon payment of any fee or any other amount that may be owed to the landlord by the tenant.” The claim may be oral or written — paragraphs (A) and (C) of subsection 5 both say so, and a landlord may not insist on writing.
After the window closes, choose one or more of the three remedies
Where the tenant never claimed within seven days, or claimed and did not retrieve by the fourteenth day, § 6013(5)(D) lets the landlord take “one or more” of: condition release on payment of all rental arrearages, damages and costs of storage; sell at a reasonable fair market price and forward all remaining balances to the Treasurer of State; or dispose of property that “has no reasonable fair market value.” They are cumulative options, not a sequence.
About the Maine abandoned property notice
The document this page generates is the written notice 14 M.R.S. § 6013(2) requires: notice of the landlord’s intent to dispose of the tenant’s property in accordance with subsection 5. Maine prescribes no form for it — no statutory paragraph, no posting on the door, no publication and no filing with any court or agency — but it does prescribe the delivery, the address and, on one of the two paragraphs, the contents. That is why a Maine-specific notice matters more here than in states where the notice is boilerplate. The form on this page asks which side of the statute’s own fault line you are on — paragraph (A), the tenant still in possession, addressed to the rental unit; or paragraph (B), the tenant who has vacated, addressed to the last known address and carrying the itemized list of the items and containers of items that only paragraph (B) requires — and prints the answer, the itemized list, the statement of intent to dispose under subsection 5 and the seven-day advisory into the notice itself. It also captures the one date the entire procedure turns on — the date the notice was sent — because the seven-day claim window and the fourteen-day storage extension both run from it, and because &ld