Free Maryland Lead Paint Disclosure

A Maryland 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 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), implemented at 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart F (EPA) and 24 CFR Part 35 Subpart A (HUD). Maryland then goes considerably further than most states. The Reduction of Lead Risk in Housing law at Md. Code, Environment §§ 6-801 to 6-852 requires you to register the property with MDE, to meet a dust-test risk reduction standard verified by an accredited inspector at every change in occupancy, and to hand the tenant an MDE Notice of Tenants’ Rights, the current inspection certificate, and an MDE information packet. Generate the federal form below, then read the Maryland regime that the form does not cover. Our Maryland habitability laws guide covers the condition-based duties that run alongside all of this.

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Maryland 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 Maryland 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.

Third, it transmits any reports the lessor holds from prior inspections, risk assessments, or hazard-reduction work. In Maryland this item has extra weight, because a compliant Maryland landlord will hold reports: Env. § 6-818 requires the accredited inspector to submit a verified report to MDE, to the owner, and to the tenant at each change in occupancy. If you have been complying with Maryland law, “no records available” is very unlikely to be the honest answer.

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. Compliance takes fifteen minutes; non-compliance is the most expensive paperwork failure in pre-1978 rental practice. And in Maryland it is only the first of two things you owe.

Yes — a substantial one. This is where Maryland parts company with the many states whose lead obligations are purely federal. Maryland’s Reduction of Lead Risk in Housing subtitle, Md. Code, Environment §§ 6-801 to 6-852, is administered by the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) and imposes duties the federal disclosure rule never contemplates.

In outline, an owner of an affected property must:

• Register the property with MDE and keep the registration current — Env. §§ 6-811, 6-812.
• Satisfy a risk reduction standard, verified by passing a lead-contaminated dust test, at every change in occupancy — Env. §§ 6-815, 6-816.
• Use an MDE-accredited inspector who is not a related party, whose verified report goes to MDE, the owner, and the tenant — Env. § 6-818.
• Deliver an MDE Notice of Tenants’ Rights plus the current verified inspection certificate at the execution of the lease or inception of the tenancy, and again at least every 2 years — Env. § 6-820.
• Deliver an MDE lead poisoning information packet on the same cadence — Env. § 6-823.
• Respond within 30 days to a notice of defect or of an elevated blood lead level in a person at risk — Env. § 6-819.

Get all of that right and Env. § 6-836 gives you a liability shield. Miss the registration and Env. § 6-813(a) takes it away by name. That is the bargain Maryland offers, and it is why the Maryland regime deserves more of your attention than the federal form does.

Most guides list “three things” a landlord must do. The regulation is more precise. 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, however professional the form looks.

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 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. Maryland law is what makes you go looking — a distinction worth holding onto as you read on.

“Target housing” is the federal term for property subject to the rule. 40 CFR 745.103 defines it as housing constructed before 1978 — that is, before 1 January 1978 — subject to the narrow exclusions below.

Why 1978 — and which 1978 date actually governs. The operative cutoff comes from the definition itself: 745.103 defines target housing as housing constructed prior to 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 reaches 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 decides coverage, but it tells you which cite to trust: for whether your unit is covered, read 745.103, not the CPSC rule.

The build date controls, not the renovation date. A 1962 Baltimore rowhouse gutted to the studs in 2005 is still target housing. Original construction is the trigger, and no amount of later work resets it. In Maryland this cuts twice, because Env. § 6-801(b) also keys “affected property” to construction date — before 1950 for the original tier, before 1978 for the tier added on 1 January 2015.

The transaction-level exemptions live at 40 CFR 745.101, and the definitional exclusions at 40 CFR 745.103. They are narrow, and — this is the part almost every page gets wrong — two of them now turn on whether a child under six is present.

Two further cautions on the federal list. The certified lead-free exemption at 745.101(b) requires an inspector certified under the federal programme or a federally accredited State or tribal programme — your own belief that the unit is clean is not a certification. And the 100-day exemption at 745.101(c) is conditioned on no renewal or extension being possible; a 90-day lease that can roll over does not qualify.

The form alone is not compliance. 40 CFR 745.113(b)(4) requires the lessee to acknowledge receipt of the lead hazard information pamphlet, and delivering the disclosure without the pamphlet is a distinct violation, not a technicality. The pamphlet is Protect Your Family From Lead in Your Home, free from epa.gov/lead in English, Spanish, and other languages.

Three practical points. Substituting your own lead handout does not satisfy the requirement — it is a federally approved pamphlet or nothing. A link emailed to the tenant is not delivery unless the E-SIGN conditions below are met. And the pamphlet is required for every lessee on the lease, not one copy for the household.

Maryland adds a second, separate booklet: the lead poisoning information packet prepared or designated by MDE under Env. § 6-823. The EPA pamphlet does not satisfy § 6-823, and the MDE packet does not satisfy 40 CFR 745.113(b)(4). Two documents, two authorities, both required.

This is the most important inversion on this page, and the thing a Maryland landlord most needs to understand.

The federal position. The disclosure rule compels disclosure of actual knowledge, not investigation. EPA states plainly that the rule does not require sellers or landlords to test or remove lead-based paint or lead-based paint hazards. If the unit has never been tested and you hold no reports, “no knowledge” is honest and lawful. What you may not do is check “no knowledge” while sitting on a report, a prior abatement record, or knowledge of a child’s elevated blood-lead result in the unit. That is not an omission; it is a false statement on a document you certify as accurate.

The Maryland position. Env. § 6-815(a) requires the owner of an affected property to “satisfy the risk reduction standard established under this subtitle by passing the test for lead-contaminated dust under § 6-816 of this subtitle,” provided any chipping, peeling, or flaking paint has been removed or repainted on the exterior painted surfaces of the building and the interior painted surfaces of the unit. Section 6-815(b) applies that at each change in occupancy thereafter, before the next tenant occupies. Section 6-815(c) requires the owner to have the property inspected to verify it.

So the sentence “landlords never have to test for lead” — true as a statement of federal law, and repeated on countless pages — is false for a Maryland affected property. Maryland landlords who absorb the federal framing and stop reading are the ones who fail an MDE inspection they did not know they owed. And note the knock-on to the federal form: once you have complied with Maryland law you hold dust-test reports and inspection certificates, which are exactly the “records or reports available to the lessor” that 40 CFR 745.113(b)(3) requires you to list and provide.

This is the most widespread error on the lead-disclosure internet. 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, and the statutory source at 42 U.S.C. 4852d(a)(1)(C) is scoped identically. Section 745.110(b) lets the purchaser waive it in writing.

Now read the lessor rules. 40 CFR 745.113(b) — the six elements above — contains no inspection-opportunity item. The sales disclosure at 745.113(a)(5) carries a “received or waived” statement about the 10-day opportunity; the lease disclosure at 745.113(b) has no counterpart. Neither does the EPA lessor form.

What this means for you. A Maryland 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 documenting a fictitious waiver is worse than one that stays silent: it is an inaccurate statement on a document every party signs certifying accuracy. The generator below prints no such line.

Complete the fields below to generate a federally compliant Maryland 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. If you are also placing a new renter, our Maryland tenant screening laws guide covers what you may check at application.

Everything in the Maryland regime keys off one defined term. Env. § 6-801(b)(1) provides that “affected property” means:

• (i) a property constructed before 1950 that contains at least one rental dwelling unit;
• (ii) on and after 1 January 2015, a property constructed before 1978 that contains at least one rental unit; or
• (iii) any residential rental property for which the owner makes an election under § 6-803(a)(2).

It includes an individual rental dwelling unit within a multifamily rental dwelling (§ 6-801(b)(2)), and it excludes property exempted under § 6-803(b) (§ 6-801(b)(3)).

The 2015 expansion is the headline. The Maryland Lead Law began life as a pre-1950 regime; the entire pre-1978 rental stock was pulled in on 1 January 2015. If your understanding of Maryland lead law dates from before then — or came from a page that does — it is a quarter-century out of date.

“Rental dwelling unit” is also defined, at § 6-801(u)(1), as a room or group of rooms forming a single independent habitable rental unit for permanent occupation with permanent provisions for living, sleeping, eating, cooking, and sanitation. Section 6-801(u)(2) carves out an area not used for those purposes (such as an unfinished basement), a unit within a hotel, motel, or similar seasonal or transient facility, an area secured and inaccessible to occupants, and a unit not offered for rent.

Note how differently the two regimes treat a studio. The federal rule excludes a 0-bedroom dwelling precisely because the living area is not separated from the sleeping area. Maryland’s definition asks instead whether the unit has permanent provisions for living, sleeping, eating, cooking, and sanitation — which a self-contained studio generally does. The same Baltimore efficiency can be outside the federal disclosure rule and inside the Maryland Lead Law at the same time.

Both tiers are affected property. Both owe registration, the § 6-815 change-in-occupancy standard, and the §§ 6-820 and 6-823 documents. But the percentage-of-inventory duties expressly exclude the newer tier, and virtually no page says so.

Env. § 6-817(a)(1) opens: “Except for properties constructed between January 1, 1950, and December 31, 1977, both inclusive, on and after February 24, 2001, an owner of affected properties shall ensure that at least 50% of the owner’s affected properties have satisfied the risk reduction standard specified in § 6-815(a)…” Env. § 6-817(b)(1) carries the identical carve-out for the 100%-where-a-person-at-risk-resides duty. So does Env. § 6-819(f), which is the mirror image of it: “Except as provided in § 6-817(b) of this subtitle and except for properties constructed between January 1, 1950, and December 31, 1977, both inclusive, on and after February 24, 2006, an owner of affected properties shall ensure that 100% of the owner’s affected properties in which a person at risk does not reside have satisfied the modified risk reduction standard.” Read the pair together and the design is clear: § 6-817(b)(1) takes the units where a person at risk does live and holds them to the § 6-815(a) risk reduction standard; § 6-819(f) takes the units where a person at risk does not live and holds them to the lesser modified standard. Between them they reach the whole of a pre-1950 portfolio — but neither reaches 1950-1977 property.

In plain terms: the inventory-percentage schedules in §§ 6-817 and 6-819(f) reach the pre-1950 stock. They do not reach 1950-1977 properties. This matters because § 6-817(a)(2) and § 6-817(b)(2) tie failure to meet those schedules directly to losing the § 6-836 liability protection for the non-compliant units — with reinstatement once the owner comes into compliance. An owner of a 1920s Baltimore portfolio and an owner of a 1968 Silver Spring garden apartment do not have the same obligations, and treating them as identical is a real, cost-bearing error in both directions.

Env. § 6-811(a)(1) requires the owner of an affected property to register it with the Department. Env. § 6-812(b) is the deadline that matters to anyone buying today: “An owner who first acquires affected property after December 1, 1995 shall register the affected property under § 6-811 of this subtitle within 30 days after the acquisition.”

Renewal. Env. § 6-812(a)(1) requires the owner to “[r]enew the registration of the affected property on or before December 31 of each year or according to a schedule established by the Department by regulation.” That either/or is the honest answer to “is it annual or every two years?” — the statute sets an annual default and expressly delegates the schedule to MDE by regulation. Whether MDE currently has a different schedule in force is a question of MDE’s regulations, not of the statute, and we have not verified it from primary rule text — so this page does not assert a cycle. Any page that flatly asserts one is quoting a snapshot. Confirm your current renewal date and the fee with MDE directly; both are administrative and can move without the statute moving. Env. § 6-812(a)(2) separately requires you to update the registration information within 30 days after any change to the owner, property, manager, insurer, or agent details listed in § 6-811(b)(1) through (5).

What the registration contains. Env. § 6-811(b) lists it: owner name and address; property address; each property manager; each insurer providing property insurance or lead hazard coverage, with policy numbers; a resident agent or contact person in the State; whether the property was built before 1950 or after 1949; the date of the latest change in occupancy; the dates and nature of treatments performed to attain or maintain a risk reduction standard; and the latest date the property was certified compliant with § 6-815. Under § 6-811(c)(1) that information is open to the public, though § 6-811(c)(2) bars MDE from disclosing an inventory or list of an owner’s properties.

This is the operational heart of the Maryland Lead Law, and the duty with no federal analogue at all.

What “change in occupancy” means. Env. § 6-801(c) defines it as a change of tenant in an affected property “in which the property is vacated and possession is either surrendered to the owner or abandoned.” A renewal with the sitting tenant is not a change in occupancy.

What you must do. Env. § 6-815(a) sets the initial standard: satisfy the risk reduction standard by passing the § 6-816 test for lead-contaminated dust, provided any chipping, peeling, or flaking paint has been removed or repainted on (1) the exterior painted surfaces of the residential building containing the unit, and (2) the interior painted surfaces of the rental dwelling unit. Env. § 6-815(b) applies the same standard “[a]t each change in occupancy thereafter, before the next tenant occupies the property.” Env. § 6-815(c) requires the owner to have the property inspected to verify the standard has been satisfied. Env. § 6-816 leaves the dust-test procedures and standards to MDE regulation.

Who may inspect. Env. § 6-818(a)(1) requires any person performing the dust testing or inspections to be accredited by MDE, to not be a related party to the owner, and to submit a verified report of the result to MDE, the owner, and the tenant. Section 6-818(a)(2) bars the owner from employing or engaging a related party to do the work. “Related party” is defined at § 6-801(r) as a person related to the owner by blood or marriage, an employee of the owner, or an entity in which the owner or such a person has an interest. You cannot inspect your own property, and you cannot hire family.

What the report buys you. Env. § 6-818(b) makes a report certifying compliance with the risk reduction standard conclusive proof of compliance for the period it covers — unless there is proof of actual fraud, proof the work was not performed by or under the supervision of personnel accredited under § 6-1002, or proof the owner failed to respond to a complaint as required by § 6-819.

The winter exception. Env. § 6-815(d) allows exterior work to be delayed under a waiver approved by the local housing-code official (or, absent one, the Department of Housing and Community Development) during any period when the local code does not require exterior work, or, if none is specified, from 1 November through 1 April. Delayed work must be completed within 30 days after the period ends, the delay does not excuse any other component of the standard, and § 6-815(d)(5) lets the owner rent during the delay only if the other components are complete and verified.

On top of the federal disclosure and the EPA pamphlet, Maryland requires three more things at the start of every tenancy in an affected property. Landlords who deliver the federal form and stop are non-compliant on the day the tenant moves in.

1. Notice of Tenants’ Rights — Env. § 6-820(b)

“On or after February 24, 1996, an owner of an affected property shall give to the tenant of the affected property a notice, prepared by the Department, of the tenant’s rights under §§ 6-817 and 6-819 of this subtitle upon the execution of a lease or the inception of a tenancy.” It is an MDE-prepared document; you do not draft your own. Env. § 6-820(c) requires you to give it again at least every 2 years after last giving it — so a long-sitting tenant is not a one-and-done.

2. The current verified inspection certificate — Env. § 6-820(d)

“The owner shall include, with the notice of the tenant’s rights that is provided to a tenant under this section upon the execution of a lease or the inception of a tenancy, a copy of the current verified inspection certificate for the affected property prepared under § 6-818 of this subtitle.” This is the direct link between the § 6-815 inspection and the tenant’s file: the certificate your accredited inspector produced is handed to the tenant with the notice.

3. Lead poisoning information packet — Env. § 6-823(b)

“[U]pon the execution of a lease or the inception of a tenancy for an affected property, the owner of the affected property shall give to the tenant a lead poisoning information packet prepared or designated by the Department.” Env. § 6-823(c) requires another copy at least every 2 years. This is a Maryland document and is not the EPA pamphlet.

How they must be delivered

Env. §§ 6-820(e)(1) and 6-823(d) both require delivery by certified mail, return receipt requested, or a verifiable method approved by the Department. Env. § 6-820(e)(2) adds that when giving the notice, “the owner shall provide documentation of the notice to the Department in a manner acceptable to the Department.” Env. §§ 6-820(e)(3) and 6-823(e) require the notice and packet to go to the parties identified as lessee in the written lease, or, absent a written lease, to whoever the property was rented to.

If you are buying an occupied affected property

Env. §§ 6-820(f) and 6-823(f) both provide that a person who has acquired, or will acquire, an affected property shall give the notice and the packet to the sitting tenant before transfer of legal title or within 15 days following transfer of legal title. Combined with the 30-day registrat