Free Massachusetts Lease Renewal Agreement

A lease renewal is an agreement to carry an existing tenancy into a further term. Whether one is available is a matter of contract in Massachusetts — nothing in the captured sections gives a tenant a right to renew, so the lease decides. Two things are not left to the lease, though: § 13 controls how soon possession can be sought after a tenancy at will ends, and § 15B puts the security deposit outside what the parties may freely agree. And the statute has something genuinely useful to say about how a renewal conversation may be conducted, in an unexpected place: the section about ending tenancies.

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This document records that an existing tenancy is continuing, on what terms, and for how long. It amends the lease rather than replacing it, so every term the parties do not change carries forward. In Massachusetts it also has a clarifying role. Because § 12 permits a single written notice to both end a tenancy at will and offer a new one on different terms, the parties can find themselves halfway between two arrangements — one ending, one offered, neither signed. A renewal agreement is what turns an offer that has been accepted in conversation into a record of what was actually agreed. It is also the document that should state the deposit is carried over unchanged, because § 15B(1)(d) does not permit a renewal to be used to demand a larger one.

• The parties, exactly as they are named on the lease being renewed.
• The property, including the unit number.
• The date the original lease was signed and the date its term ends.
• Whether the current arrangement is a lease for a term or a tenancy at will.
• The interval between the days of rent payment, which sets the notice period for an estate at will.
• Whether the premises are a rooming house, and whether rent is payable on a weekly or daily basis – section 13 treats that case differently.
• Whether any notice has already been given, by whom, and on what date the tenant received it.
• The new term – its start date, and its end date if it is a fixed term.
• The rent for the new term, and whether it has changed.
• Every other term that is changing, and a statement that the rest continue unchanged.
• What happens to the deposit already held – noting that section 15B(1)(d) bars demanding a deposit above the amount the section allows at any time after the tenancy has commenced.

• Reporting the notice period as three months. Where rent is payable at periods of less than three months, § 12 makes it the payment interval or thirty days, whichever is longer.
• Treating thirty days as an unbreakable floor. It is the floor under § 12’s notice to determine an estate at will, but § 13 provides that in the case of a rooming house an action to recover possession may be brought seven days after written notice where the rent is payable on either a weekly or daily basis.
• Using the renewal to increase the security deposit. § 15B(1)(d) bars a lessor or successor in interest from demanding, at any time after the tenancy commences, a security deposit in excess of the amount § 15B allows, and § 15B(8) makes a conflicting lease term or a tenant’s waiver void and unenforceable.
• Assuming a sale ends the tenancy. § 13 provides that a tenancy at will of property occupied for dwelling purposes is not terminated by operation of law by the conveyance, transfer or leasing of the premises by the owner or landlord, or by foreclosure.
• Assuming an offer of new terms spoils a notice. Section 12 says the opposite — the validity of the notice is not affected by including such an offer.
• Searching the statute for the word “renewal”. It is not there. The renewal rule sits inside a section about determining estates at will.
• Treating a notice with an offer in it as a renewal. An offer is an offer. Until it is accepted and recorded, the tenancy is still the one being terminated.
• Thinking a missing statutory notification kills a nonpayment notice. Under § 12 the omission extends the tenant’s time to pay or tender to the day the answer is due in any possession action, and “shall not otherwise affect the validity of the said notice”.
• Confusing the fourteen-day nonpayment notice with the end-of-tenancy notice. They are different provisions with different consequences and different cure rights.

Not by force of the sections captured for this page. Nothing in them gives a residential tenant a right to renew, so whether a renewal is available depends on what the lease says. If the lease contains a renewal or extension clause, that clause governs and its deadlines are real deadlines. If it does not, a renewal happens when both sides agree one.

What the statute does control is narrower and worth knowing precisely: how a tenancy at will is brought to an end, how soon possession may be sought afterwards, and what may and may not be done with the security deposit along the way. The first of those is § 12, the second is § 13, and the third is § 15B.

What makes Massachusetts worth reading carefully is not the answer to the automatic-renewal question but where the answer to the next one turns up.

If you search the general laws for the word “renewal” you will not find the provision that matters most to a renewal conversation. It sits in G.L. c.186 § 12, a section about determining estates at will, and it reads:

“Such written notice may include an offer to establish a new tenancy for the same premises on terms different from that of the tenancy being terminated and the validity of such written notice shall not be affected by the inclusion of such offer.”

That is a small sentence solving a real problem. A landlord who wants the tenancy to continue but on different terms is, in substance, doing two contradictory things at once: ending the arrangement that exists and proposing one that does not. Without § 12’s assurance, a tenant could argue that an offer to continue undercut the notice to quit — that you cannot demand possession and propose a tenancy in the same breath. The section says you can, and that doing so does not damage the notice.

It also carries a general lesson for anyone researching this area. Renewal is frequently legislated inside termination provisions rather than under a heading with “renewal” in it. The absence of the word is not the absence of the law.

Read practically, § 12 lets a Massachusetts landlord put one document in front of a tenant that says, in effect: this tenancy ends on such a date, and here are the terms on which I would let you stay. It is efficient, and it is lawful.

But it leaves the parties in an unusual position while the offer is outstanding. The notice is operative; the offer is not, until it is accepted. A tenant who reads the document as “the landlord has renewed me on new terms” has misread it. Until the new terms are agreed and recorded, the arrangement that is legally in motion is the one being terminated.

That gap is exactly what a written renewal closes. Nothing in § 12 requires the acceptance to be documented, but the section itself shows why documenting it is sensible: the same piece of paper contains a termination, so the record of what replaced it should be at least as clear.

One limit on what the new terms may contain is worth stating at this point rather than later. The terms offered may differ from the terms of the tenancy being terminated — that is what § 12 says — but they may not include a larger security deposit, because § 15B(1)(d) bars a lessor demanding one after the tenancy has commenced. That section is set out in full below.

Almost every practical question on this page turns on a distinction that leases themselves are often vague about: whether the tenancy is an estate at will or a lease for a term.

Section 12 is written for the first of those. Its opening words are “Estates at will may be determined by either party…”, and the notice periods, the renewal-offer sentence and the mutual obligation all sit inside that frame. A tenancy at will has no end date; it continues until somebody determines it, which is why the section is about how determination happens. Section 13 is written for the same arrangement, and it says so twice: it opens “Whenever a tenancy at will of premises occupied for dwelling purposes…” and closes with a sentence about “A tenancy at will of property occupied for dwelling purposes”.

A lease for a term is a different thing. It has an end date written into it, and the questions it raises — what happens on that date, whether a further term begins, what the tenant’s position is the day afterwards — are not the questions § 12 was drafted to answer.

The reason this matters for a renewal is that the two can be confused in practice. A tenancy that began as a twelve-month lease and has carried on informally for two years afterwards may well not be a lease for a term any more, and the parties may have quite different views about what it is. Nothing resolves that better than writing it down. The renewal is the natural moment: state which arrangement the parties intend going forward, and if it is a fixed term, state its start and end dates rather than leaving them to inference.

It is also worth saying that this page cannot resolve the characterisation question for you. How a particular arrangement is classified depends on facts and on law outside the three sections read here. What the page can do is flag that the classification is doing real work, and that a document which names it removes an argument.

The measure in § 12 is worth working through slowly, because it is a comparison rather than a figure. Where rent is payable at periods of less than three months, the notice is sufficient if it equals the interval between the days of payment or thirty days, whichever is longer.

So there are two candidate numbers and the longer one wins. For a tenant paying monthly, the interval is a month and the alternative is thirty days — and which of those is longer depends on the month in question, which is a good argument for not cutting it fine.

For a tenant paying weekly, the interval is a week and the alternative is thirty days, so under § 12 the thirty-day figure is the longer of the two and is what a notice determining the estate must run for. But do not turn that into a general thirty-day floor on possession, because § 13 carves out the very case. Section 13 provides “that in the case of a rooming house, an action to recover possession of premises occupied for dwelling purposes may be brought seven days after written notice if the rent is payable on either a weekly or daily basis”. So for a rooming house let on a weekly or daily rent, the answer to “how long before possession can be sought?” is seven days after written notice, not thirty. Outside that carve-out, the thirty-day comparison does hold the period up rather than shrinking it to match a short rent cycle.

Two further points travel with the calculation. The section requires the notice to be in writing, and it says the estate may be determined by either party — so a tenant at will who wants to leave is working to the same measure as a landlord who wants possession. Neither side gets a shorter road.

Section 12 begins: “Estates at will may be determined by either party by three months’ notice in writing … and, if the rent reserved is payable at periods of less than three months, the time of such notice shall be sufficient if it is equal to the interval between the days of payment or thirty days, whichever is longer.”

Almost every residential tenancy in Massachusetts falls into the second half of that sentence, because almost every residential tenancy pays rent monthly — an interval of less than three months. For those tenancies the notice is the payment interval or thirty days, whichever is longer. For a monthly tenancy that is thirty days or the month, not ninety days.

So a page that reports the Massachusetts rule as “three months’ notice” without the qualification is wrong for the overwhelming majority of readers who will consult it. It is worth being deliberate about this, because the three-month figure is the one that appears first in the section and is therefore the one most easily lifted out of it.

One more detail travels with the period: the section says either party. The notice obligation is mutual, so a tenant at will who wants to leave is working to the same measure.

For a tenancy at will, § 12 answers this by implication and the answer is straightforward: the tenancy continues. An estate at will is determined “by either party” giving the notice the section describes, so where nobody gives one, there is nothing to bring the arrangement to an end. Doing nothing is not a way of ending a tenancy at will; it is the way of continuing it. Section 13 points the same way from the other end: it lists conveyance, transfer, leasing and foreclosure as things that do not terminate such a tenancy by operation of law.

For a lease for a term that reaches its end date, the three sections captured for this page do not answer the question, and this page will not invent an answer. Whether the tenancy converts to a tenancy at will, expires, or continues on some other footing is not established by § 12, § 13 or § 15B, and the silence here reflects what was read rather than what Massachusetts law provides.

That is a genuine gap and it is worth treating as one. If a fixed term is approaching its end and neither side has raised renewal, the position afterwards is exactly the kind of thing best settled by a signed document in advance rather than by research afterwards — which is the practical case for using the form on this page rather than letting the date arrive.

Section 12 is not the only captured section with something to say about ending a tenancy at will. § 13 adds a second protection, it runs from a different moment, and it is carefully bounded at both ends.

Where a tenancy at will of premises occupied for dwelling purposes is terminated without fault of the tenant, either by operation of law or by act of the landlord, no action to recover possession may be brought, and the tenant may not be dispossessed, until a period equal to the interval between the days on which the rent reserved is payable, or thirty days, whichever is longer, has run from the time when the tenant receives notice in writing of the termination.

Note the measuring point: § 13 runs from the tenant’s receipt, which is not necessarily the date a notice was written or posted. On a renewal form that is why it is worth recording the date a notice was received, not merely the date it was sent.

Three limits sit inside the same sentence and each of them narrows what the section does.

• It is confined to dwellings, and excludes hotels. The premises must be “occupied for dwelling purposes, other than a room or rooms in a hotel”.
• It yields to § 12. The bar operates “except as provided in section twelve”, so where § 12 itself provides for a determination — the fourteen-day nonpayment route being the obvious case — § 13’s period is not the governing one. That, and the words without fault of the tenant, are why § 13 is not an answer to a rent-arrears problem.
• It does not make the occupation free. The section says “but such tenant shall be liable to pay rent for such time during the said period as he occupies or retains the premises, at the same rate as theretofore payable by him while a tenant at will”. The protection is against being put out early, not against paying.

And the section carries the rooming-house proviso already described: in the case of a rooming house, an action to recover possession of premises occupied for dwelling purposes may be brought seven days after written notice where the rent is payable on either a weekly or daily basis.

The second sentence of § 13 is short, and for a tenant it may be the single most useful sentence in the three captured sections: “A tenancy at will of property occupied for dwelling purposes shall not be terminated by operation of law by the conveyance, transfer or leasing of the premises by the owner or landlord thereof or by foreclosure.”

Four events are named — conveyance, transfer, leasing, foreclosure — and none of them ends the arrangement of its own force. A tenant at will who learns that the building has been sold, or that the lender has foreclosed, has not thereby lost the tenancy; a new owner who wants possession is back in § 12 and § 13, giving written notice and waiting out the period.

This has a direct bearing on a renewal document. If ownership has changed since the original lease was signed, the renewal should name the current owner as the landlord and record that the tenancy being renewed is the same tenancy, not a new one created by the sale. Section 15B(5) points the same way for the money: a lessor who transfers his interest must transfer the security deposit, with accrued interest, to his successor in interest, and the successor becomes liable for holding and returning it.

This is the point on which a renewal generator can most easily lead a Massachusetts landlord into an unlawful act, so the page states it flatly. A renewal is not an occasion to increase the security deposit.

§ 15B(1)(d) provides: “No lessor or successor in interest shall at any time subsequent to the commencement of a tenancy demand rent in advance in excess of the current month’s rent or a security deposit in excess of the amount allowed by this section.” The words that do the work are at any time subsequent to the commencement of a tenancy. A renewal, by definition, happens after the tenancy commenced.

The amount § 15B allows is fixed at the front end. Under § 15B(1)(b), at or prior to the commencement of any tenancy no lessor may require a tenant or prospective tenant to pay any amount in excess of rent for the first full month of occupancy; rent for the last full month calculated at the same rate as the first month; “a security deposit equal to the first month’s rent provided that such security deposit is deposited as required by subsection (3) and that the tenant is given the statement of condition as required by subsection (2)”; and the purchase and installation cost for a key and lock. The captured text carries two versions of that opening paragraph — one effective until August 1, 2025, and an amended one effective from that date, which extends the prohibition to an agent of the lessor and to payments made to an agent. The amended version also contemplates regulations under which a lessor and tenant may agree to a fee in lieu of a security deposit, capped at one month’s rent in total. Read the current text before relying on the detail.

§ 15B(8) closes the drafting route around all of it: “Any provision of a lease which conflicts with any provision of this section and any waiver by a tenant or prospective tenant of any provision of this section shall be deemed to be against public policy and therefore void and unenforceable.” So a renewal clause purporting to require a further deposit does not become lawful because the tenant signed it, and a tenant’s agreement to waive the section is not an agreement at all.

The consequences are set out in the same section and they are not trivial. § 15B(6) makes a lessor forfeit the right to retain any part of the deposit for any reason — and the right to counterclaim for damage to the premises in a tenant’s action to recover it — where, among other things, he “uses in any lease signed by the tenant any provision which conflicts with any provision of this section and attempts to enforce such provision or attempts to obtain from the tenant or prospective tenant a waiver of any provision of this section”. § 15B(7) goes further for failures under clauses (a), (d) or (e) of subsection 6: the tenant is awarded damages equal to three times the deposit or balance to which the tenant is entitled, plus interest, court costs and reasonable attorney’s fees.

Two boundary points, so the rule is not overstated. Section 15B is about residential arrangements, and § 15B(9) disapplies the whole section to any lease, rental, occupancy or tenancy of one hundred days or less in duration which is for a vacation or recreational purpose. And § 15B(1)(d) also caps advance rent at the current month’s rent, so a renewal that asks for a fresh last-month payment on top of the one already held deserves the same scrutiny as one that asks for a bigger deposit.

Practically, then, the deposit line on a Massachusetts renewal has one ordinary answer: the existing deposit is carried over unchanged, and the document says so. If it is being reduced or partly returned, say that instead. What the document should never record is a top-up.

Section 12 also deals with rent arrears, and it is worth separating that from anything to do with renewal. The section provides for fourteen days’ notice to quit for neglect or refusal to pay rent due, and attaches a statutory cure right: a tenant who has not received a similar notice in the preceding twelve months may preserve the tenancy by paying or tendering the rent within ten days of receiving the notice.

The notice itself must contain the notification the statute specifies — and if it does not, the consequence is not that the notice fails. Section 12 provides that the tenant’s time to pay or tender is then extended to the day the answer is due in any action by the landlord to recover possession, and that failure to include the notification “shall not otherwise affect the validity of the said notice”. A landlord who leaves it out has not destroyed the notice; a tenant who spots the omission has not won the case. What has changed is the deadline, and it has moved in the tenant’s favour.

Section 12 carries a further protection worth knowing about. Where the neglect or refusal to pay was caused by a failure or delay of the federal government, the commonwealth or any municipality, or any departments, agencies or authorities thereof, in the mailing or delivery of any subsistence or rental payment, check or voucher other than a salary payment to either the tenant or the landlord, the court in any action for possession shall continue the hearing not less than seven days in order to furnish notice of the action to the appropriate agency, and shall, if all rent due with interest and costs of suit has been tendered to the landlord within that time, treat the tenancy as not having been terminated. The continuance is not discretionary on the face of the section, and the outcome on tender is not a discretionary reprieve either.

This is not a renewal mechanism and should never be treated as one. It appears here only because it lives in the same section, and because a reader who has found § 12 for the renewal-offer sentence will encounter it immediately alongside.

Because § 12 expressly contemplates a notice that carries an offer, a Massachusetts tenancy can sit in an awkward posture: formally on its way to ending, alongside a proposal that would replace it, with the tenant’s acceptance somewhere in between — often in a phone call or a text message.

That in-between state is where disputes are made. The landlord remembers an agreement at one figure; the tenant remembers a different start date; and the only document in existence is the notice terminating the tenancy. It is a bad set of papers to be holding.

Turning it into a good set is not complicated. When an offer under § 12 is accepted, write down four things: which offer was accepted, the date the new arrangement begins, the rent, and an express statement that the earlier notice is not to be acted on. That last item is the one people leave out, and it is the one that matters — a notice that has been overtaken by agreement should be recorded as overtaken rather than left lying about with a date on it.

None of that is a statutory requirement. Section 12 does not ask for it. It is simply the paperwork that matches what the parties have actually done, and the form on this page is built to produce it.

A renewal amends the lease it renews. That sounds obvious and it is routinely forgotten, because people draft renewals as though they were fresh agreements: a page with the names, the property, the new rent and the new dates, and nothing else.

The trouble is that such a document says nothing about the twenty other things the original lease dealt with — who maintains what, what the rules about occupancy or alterations are, what happens to the deposit, what notice each side owes. Those terms do not disappear because a renewal ignored them, but a renewal that ignores them creates room to argue that they lapsed with the term they were written into.

The cure is a single sentence saying that all other terms of the original lease continue unchanged, plus an explicit list of the ones that are changing. Anything not on the list continues; anything on it is described. It takes a line and it removes the most common category of renewal dispute, which is not about the rent but about a term one side believed had gone away.

Two items deserve to be named expressly rather than left to the catch-all. The first is the deposit already held. It ordinarily carries forward rather than being returned and re-paid, and the document should say so — but this is not only a drafting preference. Under § 15B(1)(d) the deposit may not be increased at any time after the tenancy commenced, and under § 15B(8) a lease provision that conflicts with the section, or a tenant’s waiver of it, is void and unenforceable. So the only lawful answers on a renewal are that the deposit is carried over unchanged, reduced, or returned in part. The second item is who is a party — if the household has changed since the original lease, a renewal that simply repeats the old names has not recorded reality.

Because much of the Massachusetts position is contractual, the discipline of the document matters. A renewal amends the existing lease; it does not replace it. So the useful habit is to name every term that is changing and then to say, in terms, that the remainder continues unchanged. Silence about a term is not neutral — it is what produces the argument two years later about whether something lapsed.

Four things are worth stating explicitly on any Massachusetts renewal. The first is which arrangement you are actually in: a lease for a term and a tenancy at will are governed differently, and § 12’s notice rule is written for the latter. The second is the rent interval, since that is what sets the notice period for an estate at will and, through § 13, the period before possession may be sought. The third is whether the premises are a rooming house let on weekly or daily rent, because § 13 treats that case differently. The fourth is the deposit already held — carried over unchanged, because § 15B(1)(d) does not permit a demand for more once the tenancy has commenced, and a document that says nothing about it invites a dispute at the end.

The captured Massachusetts material for this page is three sections of chapter 186: § 12, § 13 and § 15B. It is not the chapter.

No just-cause requirement was located in those three sections. That is a statement about what was read, not a finding about Massachusetts law — three sections cannot support a conclusion that the state has no such rule, and this page does not draw one. Similarly, no provision on automatic-renewal clauses was located in them, so the page says nothing about whether such a clause needs separate notice in Massachusetts.

Local ordinances were not searched, and no case law was consulted. Massachusetts practice around notices to quit is also shaped by procedural requirements outside these sections. Check the current text and take advice before relying on anything this page does not say.

The sequence above covers the five steps that matter most. These follow from the same provisions and are worth doing in the same sitting.

• Carry the deposit forward – do not increase it. G.L. c.186 section 15B(1)(d) provides that no lessor or successor in interest shall at any time subsequent to the commencement of a tenancy demand rent in advance in excess of the current month’s rent or a security deposit in excess of the amount allowed by the section, and section 15B(8) makes any conflicting lease provision, and any tenant waiver, void and unenforceable. Record the deposit as carried over, not as topped up.
• Keep the rent question separate from the renewal question. Section 12’s fourteen-day notice for neglect or refusal to pay rent has its own cure rules and is not a renewal mechanism.

A renewal is mostly a matter of contract, so what it can do is decided by the existing lease before it is decided by statute. The place state law bites hardest is the rent, because continuing a tenancy is when it usually changes. Our guide to Massachusetts rent increase laws sets out the notice that has to come first, which is often the real deadline in that negotiation.

The second place is what happens when the parties do not agree. An expiring term does not resolve itself, and Massachusetts eviction notice laws explain the notices and timelines that follow if a tenant stays on without a new agreement.

For the obligations that run between a landlord and a tenant throughout the tenancy, and the rules that apply to both sides, see Massachusetts landlord tenant laws.

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