Free Michigan Lead Paint Disclosure

A Michigan 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). Michigan imposes no separate lead paint disclosure statute — the disclosure duty here is purely federal, and we prove that below from Michigan’s own statutory text rather than asserting it. What Michigan does add is a mandatory lead safe housing registry duty (MCL 333.5474b), a criminal landlord penalty statute (MCL 333.5475a, Public Act 434), a certification regime, and an independent habitability duty under MCL 554.139 covered in our Michigan habitability laws guide. Generate the form below, then read on for exactly what the rule requires.

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Free Michigan 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 Michigan 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. In Michigan this item has an extra edge: if such records exist because the unit was abated or interim-controlled, the same facts may trigger the registry duty at MCL 333.5474b discussed below.

Fourth, it documents the tenant’s receipt of the disclosure and of the EPA pamphlet. The signed acknowledgment is the landlord’s primary evidence 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 Michigan rental leased without one exposes the landlord to government civil penalties and to a tenant’s private action for triple damages plus fees under 42 U.S.C. 4852d(b)(3) and (b)(4). Compliance takes fifteen minutes; non-compliance is the most expensive paperwork failure in pre-1978 rental practice. If you are assembling a full move-in packet, pair this with our Michigan lease agreement and Michigan move-in checklist.

No. Michigan adds no lead paint disclosure duty whatsoever. The disclosure duty for a Michigan rental is entirely federal. That is the single most useful thing this page can tell a Michigan landlord, and it is worth stating carefully, because “this state adds nothing” is only useful if it is demonstrated rather than assumed.

Michigan’s lead statute is the lead abatement act, Part 54A of the Public Health Code, MCL 333.5451 to 333.5479 (MCL 333.5451 gives it that short title; MCL 333.5478 and 333.5479 were repealed by 2007 PA 162, effective 1 July 2010, so the operative part ends at MCL 333.5477). Read end to end — all 37 sections in the legislature’s index for the part — it is a certification, training, abatement and enforcement regime. It tells you who may perform a lead inspection, what a risk assessor must be trained in, what an accredited training program must teach, what fees apply, what the department may fine, and what happens to a landlord who leaves a known hazard in place while a poisoned child lives there. It never tells a landlord to disclose anything to a tenant.

We checked the obvious adjacent doors as well, because a half-read statutory chain is worse than none:

• The Truth in Renting Act (1978 PA 454, MCL 554.631 to 554.641) is where Michigan says what a lease must and must not contain. MCL 554.634 lists the mandatory lease statements: the lessor’s notice address, and a prescribed 12-point notice telling tenants the agreement must comply with the Truth in Renting Act. Lead is not mentioned. MCL 554.633’s list of prohibited clauses does not mention lead either.
• MCL 554.139, the habitability covenant, is condition-based, not disclosure-based. It is real and it matters (see the habitability section below), but it is not a disclosure duty.
• The lead safe housing registry at MCL 333.5474b is a filing duty owed to the department, not a disclosure owed to a tenant.

So the honest, complete answer is: in Michigan, the lead paint disclosure duty begins and ends with federal law. Any page selling you a “Michigan lead paint disclosure law”, a “Michigan-specific lead form”, or extra Michigan lease language for lead is describing something that does not exist. Michigan’s real lead duties are adjacent ones — a registry filing, a criminal penalty statute, a certification regime, and habitability — and each is covered below with its section number.

Nearly every page on this topic paraphrases the rule. It is more useful to enumerate it, because 40 CFR 745.113(b) is a list of exactly six elements that must appear in, or be attached to, every lease of target housing. If your disclosure carries all six, it complies; if it drops one, it does not. The generator on this page produces all six.

Read that list once more and notice what is not on it. There is no inspection item. There is no 10-day item. There is no waiver item. The lease limb of the rule contains no opportunity-to-evaluate element of any kind — a point we return to below, because it is the single most repeated error in this form category.

Notice also who states each element. Items 4, 5 and 6 are statements by the lessee, by the agent, and by all parties signing. They are not facts the landlord can assert on the tenant’s behalf, which is why they print as blank initial and signature lines on the generated PDF.

The disclosure duty attaches to target housing. 40 CFR 745.103, as amended eff. 13 January 2025 (89 FR 89416), defines it as: “any housing constructed prior to 1978, except housing for the elderly or persons with disabilities or any 0-bedroom dwelling (unless any child who is less than 6 years of age resides or is expected to reside in such housing).”

Three practical consequences follow.

The original construction date controls. Not the renovation date, not the date you bought it, not the date the kitchen was replaced. A 1954 Detroit bungalow taken back to the studs in 2010 is still target housing. The question the rule asks is when the housing was constructed.

1978 is the line, and it is a construction line, not a paint line. The reason the year matters is historical: the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s ban at 16 CFR 1303.1 covers paint manufactured after 27 February 1978. But the operative trigger in the disclosure rule is not when the paint was made — it is 745.103’s “constructed prior to 1978”. Do not conflate the two. A unit built in 1979 is outside the rule even if someone later brushed on a tin of pre-ban paint from a garage shelf.

Verify the date from a record, not from memory. Use the local assessor’s record, the certificate of occupancy, or the original building permit. In much of Michigan’s older housing stock — Detroit, Grand Rapids, Flint, Saginaw, Lansing, Hamtramck — the majority of rental units predate 1978, so the default assumption for an unverified older property should be that the rule applies.

Michigan writes the same definition — and writes it more clearly

Michigan has its own target housing definition, at MCL 333.5460(1), and comparing the two is genuinely instructive. Michigan’s version reads: “‘Target housing’ means housing constructed before 1978, except any of the following: (a) Housing for the elderly or persons with disabilities, unless any 1 or more children age 6 years or less resides or is expected to reside in that housing. (b) A 0-bedroom dwelling. (c) An unoccupied dwelling unit pending demolition, provided the dwelling unit remains unoccupied until demolition.”

Two things are worth noticing.

Michigan adds a third carve-out the federal rule does not have — subdivision (c), the unoccupied unit pending demolition. That carve-out governs Michigan’s Part 54A duties (including the registry duty below). It does not shrink your federal disclosure duty, because the federal definition at 745.103 has no demolition limb. If you are leasing, you are not demolishing, so the point is mostly academic for a live tenancy — but it matters when you are working out whether Part 54A reaches a given building.

Michigan’s drafting settles a federal ambiguity. By enumerating the exclusions as separate subdivisions (a), (b) and (c), Michigan makes plain what the federal sentence packs into one line: the child condition sits inside the elderly and disabled limb, and the zero-bedroom exclusion stands alone. That is exactly how the federal sentence parses too, and it is where most pages go wrong.

One genuine divergence: the federal parenthetical says a child “less than 6 years of age”; Michigan says “age 6 years or less”. A six-year-old is outside the federal condition but inside Michigan’s. That wording gap runs to Michigan’s Part 54A duties — it does not change your federal disclosure duty, whose “less than 6” condition, since the 2025 amendment, reaches both the elderly/disabled and the 0-bedroom limbs.

The exemptions are narrow and they are enumerated at 40 CFR 745.101, which applies the subpart to all transactions to sell or lease target housing, including subleases, with four exceptions. For a landlord, three of the four matter:

What counts as a 0-bedroom dwelling is defined, not left to intuition. 40 CFR 745.103: “0-bedroom dwelling means any residential dwelling in which the living area is not separated from the sleeping area. The term includes efficiencies, studio apartments, dormitory housing, military barracks, and rentals of individual rooms in residential dwellings.”

That last clause does real work in Michigan. Rentals of individual rooms in a residential dwelling are 0-bedroom dwellings. A landlord letting rooms individually in a pre-1978 house — a common arrangement around Ann Arbor, East Lansing, Ypsilanti and Mount Pleasant — is renting 0-bedroom dwellings, which are outside the disclosure rule. Dormitory housing is named in the definition too.

The disclosure is only half of the delivery. 40 CFR 745.107(a)(1) requires the lessor to give the lessee an EPA-approved lead hazard information pamphlet — Protect Your Family From Lead in Your Home (EPA document 747-K-94-001) or an equivalent pamphlet approved for use in that State by EPA. The lessee’s acknowledgment item at 745.113(b)(4) then records receipt of the pamphlet, which is required under 15 U.S.C. 2696.

Practical points landlords trip on:

• The pamphlet is a separate deliverable. A signed disclosure with no pamphlet delivered is an incomplete compliance chain, and the tenant has signed a statement saying they received something they did not.
• Deliver it before the tenant is obligated, on the same 745.107(a) timing as the disclosure itself.
• Record which edition you handed over. EPA revises the pamphlet. A note in the file naming the edition and the delivery date is cheap and answers the question years later.
• A link is not delivery unless you have satisfied the E-SIGN conditions described below.

This is the question Michigan landlords ask most, and the rule answers it in terms. 40 CFR 745.107(a) states: “Nothing in this section implies a positive obligation on the seller or lessor to conduct any evaluation or reduction activities.”

You are not required to test. You are not required to inspect, to commission a risk assessment, or to hire anyone. Michigan adds no testing duty either — Part 54A regulates the people who perform lead work, not landlords who decline to commission it.

What the rule compels is honest transmission of actual knowledge. If the unit has never been tested and you hold no reports, “no knowledge” is the correct, honest, lawful answer, and the generator will produce a disclosure saying exactly that.

Deliberate ignorance is also not a defence to the disclosure duty, and it is a poor commercial strategy. If a certified risk assessor’s report exists anywhere in your files, it is “available” within the meaning of 40 CFR 745.103, which defines available as “in the possession of or reasonably obtainable by the seller or lessor at the time of the disclosure.”

A Michigan landlord owes a prospective tenant no 10-day lead inspection period. This is the most repeated error in the lead disclosure form category, and it is worth settling with the two regulatory texts side by side.

Here is the 10-day rule, in full, at 40 CFR 745.110(a):

Every actor in that sentence is a sales actor. Purchaser, purchase, seller, purchaser. The statute behind it, 42 U.S.C. 4852d(a)(1)(C), is drafted the same way. And 745.110(b) confirms the frame: a purchaser may waive the opportunity in writing.

Now the lease limb. 40 CFR 745.113(b) lists the six elements a lease must carry — warning statement, lessor’s knowledge, records list, lessee’s receipt, agent’s statement, signatures. Search it for an inspection opportunity and you will find nothing: no 10-day period, no risk assessment item, no waiver, not even a cross-reference to 745.110. The sales limb at 745.113(a) has a seventh element that the lease limb simply does not have — 745.113(a)(5), a statement by the purchaser that he or she has either received the opportunity to conduct the risk assessment or inspection required by 745.110(a), or waived it.

Two honest qualifications. First, you may offer an inspection window voluntarily. Nothing stops a Michigan landlord letting a prospective tenant bring in a certified risk assessor before signing, and for an older property with an anxious family it can be a sensible commercial gesture. It is best practice, never law — so do not describe it to the tenant as a federal right. Second, if you sell the property rather than lease it, the 10-day rule does apply to you, in full, along with the seventh element at 745.113(a)(5).

Complete the fields below to generate a federally compliant Michigan 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. It prints no 10-day line, because a lease disclosure has no 10-day element.

40 CFR 745.113(c)(1) requires the lessor, and any agent, to retain a copy of the completed attachment or lease contract containing the required information for no less than three years from the commencement of the leasing period. Note the trigger: commencement of the leasing period, not the signature date, not the move-out date.

Retain, as one bundle per tenancy: the signed disclosure; a note of which pamphlet edition was delivered and when; copies of every record and report you listed and handed over; and, if you delivered electronically, the E-SIGN consent trail.

Three years is the floor, not the target. The signed disclosure is your primary evidence in an EPA or HUD inquiry or a private action, and the limitation periods that matter in a lead-exposure claim can run far longer than three years — particularly where a child’s injury is involved. Keeping the bundle for the life of ownership costs nothing and is the practice we would recommend to any Michigan landlord.

Electronic disclosure and signature are permitted under the E-SIGN Act, 15 U.S.C. 7001. Michigan adds no obstacle. But “we emailed a link” is not delivery, and the conditions are where landlords fail:

• Statement of the right to receive paper. The tenant must be told clearly they may have paper documents instead.
• Withdrawal procedure and consequences. Explain how consent is withdrawn and what follows.
• Access and retention. Explain how the tenant accesses and keeps the electronic records — a portal link that dies at move-out is not retention.
• Demonstrated consent. Obtain consent in a way that shows the tenant can actually access the format you are using. A tenant who cannot open the file has not received the disclosure.

Then retain the electronic record, and the consent trail, for the same three years required by 745.113(c)(1). If any of the four conditions is shaky — an applicant without reliable email, a shared household device, a language barrier — hand over paper. It is one page.

This is Michigan’s most overlooked landlord duty, and it is the reason a Michigan lead page cannot simply be a federal page with the state’s name swapped in. Not one of the ten ranking pages we measured for this topic mentions it.

MCL 333.5474b(1) directs the department, with the family independence agency and the Michigan state housing development authority, to establish and maintain a registry — the lead safe housing registry — listing residential and multifamily dwellings and child occupied facilities that have been abated of, or have had interim controls performed to control, lead-based paint hazards as determined through a lead-based paint investigation performed by a certified risk assessor.

Then comes the duty. MCL 333.5474b(2): “The owner of target housing that is offered for rent or lease as a residence or the owner of a child occupied facility shall register that property with the department if that property has been abated of or has had interim controls performed to control lead-based paint hazards as determined through a lead-based paint investigation performed by a certified risk assessor certified under this part in a form as prescribed by the department free of charge.”

Unpack it into its four working parts:

The registration form must include, at minimum: the owner’s name; the building’s address; the date of construction; and the date and description of any lead-based paint activity, including the name of the certified abatement worker or certified risk assessor who performed the abatement or conducted the inspection, lead-hazard screen, assessment or clearance testing, and the results.

MCL 333.5474b(3) adds a second, easily missed obligation: an owner required to register “shall provide the department with a copy of each report, document, or other information that is required to be filed with the federal government under federal law and regulations related to lead-based paint.” If you are inside the mandatory limb, your federal lead paperwork has a Michigan filing destination too.

MCL 333.5474b(4) runs the other way: the owner of any other residential or multifamily dwelling offered for rent, or of a child occupied facility, may register voluntarily, and the department shall include it on the registry. That limb requires the form plus the prescribed fee. Under subsection (5), the department publishes the registry on its website.

Several pages tell Michigan landlords that “Public Act 434” means jail for renting a unit with lead. That is a caricature of a narrow statute with cumulative elements and two affirmative defences. Here is what MCL 333.5475a actually does.

The subject: a property manager, housing commission, or owner of a rental unit who rents or continues to rent a residential housing unit to a family with a minor child found to have 10 micrograms or more of lead per deciliter of venous blood.

The elements — all three must apply (MCL 333.5475a(1)):

• (a) Prior actual knowledge that the rental unit contains a lead-based paint hazard.
• (b) At least ninety days have passed since that actual knowledge.
• (c) No good-faith action to reduce the hazards through interim controls, abatement, or a combination of the two.

The knowledge presumption (MCL 333.5475a(2)) is narrower than people assume. Actual knowledge is presumed only if one of exactly two things happened: the owner signed an acknowledgment of the hazard as a result of a risk assessment under the chapter at the time the risk assessment was made; or the owner was served, as a result of a risk assessment under the chapter, with notice of the hazard by first-class mail and a return receipt of that service was obtained. Both routes run through a risk assessment. A rumour, a tenant’s complaint, or a neighbour’s remark does not trigger the presumption.

The penalties (MCL 333.5475a(3)). Conviction is a misdemeanor: imprisonment for not more than 93 days or a statutory fine of not more than $5,000.00, or both. Where the defendant was previously convicted of violating this section or a substantially corresponding local ordinance, the misdemeanor carries imprisonment for not more than 93 days or a statutory fine of not more than $10,000.00, or both. These are penalty ceilings set by the statute itself, not adjusted figures.

The affirmative defences (MCL 333.5475a(4)). The landlord may assert either, and carries the burden of proof by a preponderance of the evidence:

• That the landlord