Free Michigan Roommate Agreement

A roommate agreement is a contract between the roommates, and the landlord named on the lease is not a party to it. Michigan adds a twist that catches people out. If one roommate holds the lease and the others pay them, the Security Deposit Act may treat that lease-holder as a landlord — because MCL § 554.601(a)(i) defines the term to include a sublessor. Everything the Act requires of a landlord then applies to a person who probably thinks of themselves as just a tenant with a spare room.

Fill in the fields below and the generator produces a clean, dated PDF that every roommate can sign 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.

Watch: Free Michigan Roommate Agreement explained

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A roommate agreement records what the people sharing a unit have agreed between themselves. Where all of them are named on the lease, it binds them to each other and leaves the landlord’s rights untouched — each remains liable for the whole rent on a joint and several basis where the lease says so, and no Michigan statute changes that. Where one of them holds the lease and the others do not, the document is doing something more consequential, because the Security Deposit Act may treat the lease-holder as a landlord. This generator records both situations, and the questions it asks are the ones that decide which of them you are in.

• Who is named on the lease, and whether one roommate is subletting to the others
• If so, that the Security Deposit Act may apply to that roommate as a landlord
• Each roommate’s share of the rent, and who pays whom
• Each roommate’s share of the deposit, and who is holding it
• The forwarding address each roommate will give within four days of leaving
• The volume of any room used for sleeping, if occupancy is in question
• What happens if a roommate is released under MCL § 554.601b
• Guests, quiet hours, smoking, pets and cleaning
• The notice a departing roommate gives the others, and who approves a replacement
• That the agreement binds the roommates only and does not bind the landlord on the lease

• Taking a roommate’s deposit informally. MCL 554.601(a)(i) includes a sublessor in the definition of landlord, so the whole Act may follow – non-waivably.
• Assuming a release under § 554.601b lowers the rent. Subsection (5) keeps all other tenants subject to the rental agreement.
• Counting the release period in days. It runs to the first day of the second month that rent is due after notice, which is not thirty or sixty days.
• Citing MCL 554.138 for roommate rent. It concerns co-owners holding as joint tenants or tenants in common, not co-renters.
• Looking for a persons-per-bedroom rule. Michigan measures cubic feet of air space under MCL 125.483 instead.

No. The words “roommate”, “roommates”, “housemate” and “additional occupant” return zero results across the whole of the Michigan Compiled Laws. There is no statutory right to have a roommate and no process for adding or removing one.

“Jointly and severally” does appear sixty-four times in the Compiled Laws, but none of those occurrences is in landlord-tenant law. One in particular is worth warning about, because it looks apt and is not: MCL § 554.138 deals with people holding an estate “as joint tenants or tenants in common”. That is co-ownership of property, not two people renting a flat, and it should not be cited for how roommates share rent.

Michigan does contain one provision pointing the other way on whether you may take in a lodger at all. MCL § 125.484 allows a health officer to prohibit, in any multiple dwelling, the letting of lodgings by any of the tenants — and provides that non-compliance is “sufficient cause for the summary eviction of such tenant”.

This is the finding that matters most on this page, and it applies to an arrangement that is completely ordinary: one person signs the lease, and the others pay them.

MCL § 554.601(a)(i) defines “landlord”, for the purposes of the Security Deposit Act, to include a sublessor. A tenant who sublets a room and takes money from the occupant as a deposit is therefore capable of being a landlord under that Act, with all of a landlord’s obligations.

Those obligations are not trivial. The deposit may not exceed one and a half months’ rent (§ 554.602). Within fourteen days of the tenant taking possession the landlord must give written notice of the landlord’s name and address, the name and address of the financial institution or surety required by § 554.604, and the tenant’s duty to give a forwarding address within four days after termination of occupancy — and that warning must be in 12-point boldface type at least 4 points larger than the body (§ 554.603). The financial-institution disclosure is the one a lease-holder holding a roommate’s cash in a personal account is most certain to fail.

Within thirty days of the end of the occupancy the landlord must give an itemised list of damages claimed (§ 554.609), and § 554.610 provides that a landlord who fails to do so within that period forfeits the right to retain any of it. Section 554.611 puts the matching duty on the tenant: give a forwarding address within four days of termination of occupancy, and failing to do so relieves the landlord of the notice-of-damages requirement — though it does not prejudice the tenant’s later claim for the deposit itself. Section 554.613(1) then gives the landlord 45 days from termination of the occupancy, and not thereafter, to commence an action for damages; and § 554.613(2) makes a failure to comply fully with that section a waiver of all claimed damages and renders the landlord liable to the tenant for double the amount of the security deposit retained.

None of this can be drafted away. Section 554.606 makes the Act non-waivable, and the Truth in Renting Act, at § 554.633(1)(b) and (3), makes a lease or agreement provision waiving a right under the Act void.

The practical response is not alarm but clarity. Either the roommate goes on the lease, so the landlord on the lease holds a single deposit from everyone; or the lease-holder treats the money properly — separate, documented, itemised at the end — and this agreement records that they are doing so. What does not work is calling it an informal arrangement.

Nobody, as far as the statute is concerned — and this is the finding a Michigan roommate agreement most has to answer, because the Act says nothing about it at all. Across all twenty sections of the Security Deposit Act, the words “apportion”, “pro rata”, “co-tenant”, “occupant” and “guest” return zero occurrences. The Act runs between one landlord and “the tenant”, singular.

So there is no statutory mechanism to split a deposit, no route by which a departing roommate gets a partial refund mid-term, and no rule saying which co-tenant the cheque is made out to. Every part of that allocation is private contract. The generator above collects the deposit shares and the refund route for exactly that reason: whatever the roommates write down is the only allocation that will exist.

MCL § 554.601b is the domestic-violence release provision, and saying so matters: it is not a general route off a lease. It is available to a tenant who has a reasonable apprehension of present danger to themselves or their child from domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking, on certified-mail notice supported by one of the forms of documentation the section lists — a personal protection order, a probation or parole order, a police report with charges, or the statutory qualified-third-party form.

It answers the co-tenant question directly. Subsection (5) provides that where a rental agreement obligates multiple tenants and one of them is released, all other tenants who are parties to the rental agreement remain subject to it. The rent owed does not fall, and the roommates who stay are the ones who will be asked for it.

The timing is easy to get wrong. Subsection (2) sets the release at no later than the first day of the second month that rent is due after notice is given. That is a rent-due-date count, not a period of days, and it can be materially longer than the thirty days people assume — never less than a full rent cycle. The release is never effective before the tenant has actually vacated, it does not touch prepaid first or last month’s rent, and the deposit remains withholdable under § 554.613(1)(d). Notice is given by certified mail, and the section applies to rental agreements entered into, renewed or renegotiated after 5 October 2010.

Michigan has a provision worth knowing for roommate disputes specifically. MCL § 600.2918(1) gives a cause of action to “any person” who is forcibly ejected or kept out of premises, with damages of three times the actual damages or two hundred dollars, whichever is greater. Because it speaks of any person rather than any tenant, it is capable of reaching a roommate-on-roommate lockout. Section 600.2918(7) makes the right non-waivable.

One limit is worth stating precisely, because it is easy to over-read. The separate list in § 600.2918(2) — changing locks, interrupting utilities and so on — is framed against “the owner”. That part should not be attributed to a plain co-tenant.

Where everyone is on the lease, this document binds the roommates to each other and leaves the landlord’s position untouched: each named tenant can still be pursued for the whole rent. Where one roommate holds the lease and the others do not, the document is also the record of an arrangement that Michigan law may treat as a tenancy in its own right. Either way, nothing written here moves anyone on or off the lease — only the landlord can do that.

A roommate agreement is a private contract, so most of what it does is decided by the roommates rather than by statute. The parts that state law does reach are the ones that involve the landlord — and the biggest of those is the deposit. Our guide to Michigan security deposit laws sets out what the landlord may hold and when it has to come back, which is the money the roommates are dividing between themselves.

The other place state law bites is non-payment. An internal agreement about shares does not change what the landlord may do if the total rent is short, and Michigan eviction notice laws explain the notices and timelines that follow — which reach everyone named on the lease, not only the roommate who fell behind.

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

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