Free New Hampshire Lead Paint Disclosure

A New Hampshire 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). New Hampshire imposes no separate lead paint disclosure statute — the disclosure duty here is purely federal. What New Hampshire does add is a genuinely consequential parallel regime under RSA 130-A: a statutory duty of reasonable care, a lead-safety certification requirement for conversions, and a hazard-reduction order that is recorded at the registry of deeds and runs with the land. Our New Hampshire landlord-tenant laws overview covers the rest of the tenancy. Generate the form below, then read on for exactly what each rule requires.

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New Hampshire 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 New Hampshire 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 New Hampshire this item quietly does more work than elsewhere, because a property that has been through the RSA 130-A:5 investigation process may carry an inspection report, a risk assessment, and an RSA 130-A:7 order — all of them records available to the lessor, all of them disclosable.

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 — and, uniquely in New Hampshire, it is admissible evidence of reasonable care under RSA 130-A:18.

The disclosure is not optional and the duty is not waivable by agreement. A pre-1978 New Hampshire rental leased without one exposes the landlord to government civil penalties and to a tenant’s private action for treble damages plus fees. Compliance takes fifteen minutes; non-compliance is the most expensive paperwork failure in pre-1978 rental practice.

No. New Hampshire has no state-specific lead paint disclosure statute for landlords, and this page will not invent one. Every element of the disclosure described here comes from federal law: 42 U.S.C. 4852d, 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart F, and 24 CFR Part 35 Subpart A. If you are hunting for the New Hampshire statute number that makes you hand a tenant a lead form, there is not one to find.

That answer needs a careful qualifier, because New Hampshire is emphatically not one of the states that adds nothing. It has a substantial lead chapter — RSA 130-A, Lead Paint Poisoning Prevention and Control — and a lead notification section in the conveyances title, RSA 477:4-a. Neither creates a landlord disclosure duty at lease-up, and that distinction is the single most useful thing on this page. Here is the whole New Hampshire layer, sorted by what it actually does to you:

• A duty of reasonable care — RSA 130-A:18. Owners of pre-1978 rental housing must take reasonable care to prevent exposure to, and the creation of, lead hazards. This is a real statutory standard, and it is the provision that connects your federal paperwork to New Hampshire civil liability. Covered in full below.
• Lead-safety certification for conversions — RSA 130-A:5-d. After July 1, 2024, a pre-1978 building being converted to rental use must be certified lead-safe before occupancy. It does not touch existing rentals.
• An investigation and order regime — RSA 130-A:5, :6, :7. Triggered by a child’s elevated blood lead level, not by leasing. The resulting order is recorded against your title.
• Contractor licensing — RSA 130-A:9 and :12. Lead inspectors, risk assessors, and abatement contractors must be licensed. This is a regime for the people doing the work, not a disclosure duty for you.
• A sales notification — RSA 477:4-a. Real, and irrelevant to leasing: it applies before a contract for purchase and sale, and expressly creates no liability.

Notice what is missing from that list: nothing in it tells a landlord to give a prospective tenant a lead form. That job belongs entirely to the federal rule. And 40 CFR 745.119 confirms the two layers coexist rather than compete — nothing in the federal subpart relieves a lessor from compliance with state or local laws governing notice or disclosure of lead. Because the disclosure obligation is federal rather than state-specific, the identical form works in any state; our federal lead-based paint disclosure form is the generic version of the New Hampshire form on this page. For the condition-based duties that disclosure does not address, see our New Hampshire habitability laws guide.

Most guides list “three things” a landlord must do. The regulation is more precise than that. 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, regardless of how professional the form looks. This is the checklist to audit your own paperwork against.

Note what is not in that list: no inspection window, no testing requirement, no filing with any agency, no notarisation, and no obligation to remediate. The 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.

The contrast with the sales side is exact and worth seeing, because it is the origin of the internet’s favourite lead-paint error. The seller’s list at 40 CFR 745.113(a) has seven elements, not six. The extra one is (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. That item exists on the sales form and only on the sales form. When a vendor bolts a “10-day inspection” checkbox onto a rental disclosure, what they have actually done is copy element (a)(5) from the wrong list.

“Target housing” is the federal term for property subject to the rule, and the definition at 40 CFR 745.103 is the sentence that decides whether you owe a disclosure at all. It reads: “Target housing means 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).” Parse the exceptions carefully, because this sentence is widely misquoted: the child-under-six parenthetical attaches only to the elderly-or-disabled limb, and “or any 0-bedroom dwelling” is a separate, unconditional exclusion. A studio is therefore not target housing even when a child under six lives there.

Why 1978 — and which 1978 date actually governs. The operative cutoff comes from the definition itself: housing constructed prior to 1978, meaning construction before 1 January 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 a different date and a different test. 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 is what decides coverage, but it tells you which cite to trust: for whether your unit is covered, read 745.103, not the CPSC rule.

How to verify the build year in New Hampshire. The municipal assessing record is the fastest authoritative source, and New Hampshire towns and cities publish property record cards showing year built. The original certificate of occupancy, the building permit file, and title records also establish it. The lessor carries the burden of correctly identifying target housing — “I think it was around 1980” is not a defence, and a guess that turns out wrong is a knowing violation waiting to happen.

Renovation does not reset the clock. A 1910 mill-town duplex stripped to the studs and rebuilt in 2003 is still target housing. The original construction date controls, not the date of the most recent renovation. This trips up owners of heavily rehabbed older stock constantly — and New Hampshire has a great deal of heavily rehabbed older stock.

Common areas in multi-unit buildings. If the building predates 1978, the disclosure scope reaches the common areas as well as the leased unit — hallways, stairwells, porches, laundry rooms, and shared storage. 40 CFR 745.107(a)(4) is explicit that the records requirement “includes records or reports regarding common areas” and also records regarding other residential dwellings in multifamily target housing, where the information is part of an evaluation or reduction of lead-based paint in the housing as a whole. A building-wide evaluation is therefore disclosable to every tenant in the building, not just the one whose unit it sampled.

New Hampshire context. New Hampshire’s housing stock skews old by national standards. The mill cities and older town centres — Manchester, Nashua, Concord, Berlin, Claremont, Somersworth, Rochester, Laconia, Franklin, Dover, Portsmouth — carry large concentrations of pre-1978 multifamily housing, much of it built long before 1950 when paint lead content was highest. For a great many New Hampshire landlords the honest answer to “is this target housing?” is simply yes, and the exemption analysis below is a formality. Portfolio owners with mixed-vintage holdings are the ones who get caught, because the compliance answer differs unit by unit.

Even pre-1978 property can fall outside the rule. The carve-outs are narrow, and they come from two different places in the regulation — which is why competing lists of “the lead paint exemptions” disagree with one another. Some are exclusions written into the definition of target housing at 40 CFR 745.103: a unit that meets one of those was never target housing in the first place. The others are transaction-level exemptions listed at 40 CFR 745.101: the housing is target housing, but this particular deal is outside the subpart. The compliance answer is often the same either way, but knowing which provision governs tells you which text to read and which facts matter.

• Housing built in 1978 or later (40 CFR 745.103). Not target housing at all.
• Zero-bedroom dwellings (40 CFR 745.103, definitional). The rule defines these too: “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.” This exclusion is unconditional. Read the target-housing sentence carefully: the structure is “except [housing for the elderly or persons with disabilities (unless any child under 6…)] or [any 0-bedroom dwelling]”. The child-under-six parenthetical sits inside the elderly-or-disabled limb; it does not reach the 0-bedroom limb. A genuine studio is not target housing even when a child under six resides there. Some pages garble this by attaching the child condition to the studio exclusion; the regulation does not. The real trap runs the other way, in the warning box below: a unit with a separate sleeping area is not a 0-bedroom dwelling no matter how small.
• Housing for the elderly or persons with disabilities (40 CFR 745.103, definitional). “Housing for the elderly” is itself defined as retirement communities or similar housing reserved for households composed of one or more persons 62 years of age or more at the time of initial occupancy. This is the one exclusion on the whole page that carries a child condition: it collapses if any child under six resides or is expected to reside there. The 0-bedroom limb does not share that condition.
• Short-term leases of 100 days or less (40 CFR 745.101(c)), where no lease renewal or extension can occur. Both halves matter. A New Hampshire seasonal or ski-season let typically qualifies; a month-to-month tenancy does not, because it renews.
• Certified lead-free housing (40 CFR 745.101(b)). Leases of target housing found to be lead-based paint free by a certified inspector. In New Hampshire the inspector must be licensed under RSA 130-A:12. Retain the certification; it is the only proof of the exemption.
• Qualifying lease renewals (40 CFR 745.101(d)). A renewal of an existing lease where the lessor already made every disclosure required by 745.107 and no new information described in 745.107 has come into the lessor’s possession. Watch the cross-reference: 745.101(d) points at 745.107, not at 745.113; pages that cite 745.113 here have followed the wrong thread. Renewal includes both renegotiation of existing terms and ratification of a new lease. If anything new reached you, the exemption is gone.
• Foreclosure sales (40 CFR 745.101(a)). Exempt — but note this is a sales exemption, and it is the one most often misread on rental pages. A purchaser at foreclosure who then leases the pre-1978 property owes the tenant the full disclosure.

None of the four exemptions at 745.101 carries a child condition. That is worth stating flatly, because a common garbling of this material claims the exemptions “evaporate” when a young child is involved. The child condition lives in exactly one place: the elderly-or-disabled limb of the target-housing definition at 745.103. It does not reach the 0-bedroom limb, and it does not touch the four transaction exemptions at 745.101. One exclusion turns on whether a young child is present; the rest do not.

Federal law requires the lessor to give the prospective lessee an EPA-approved lead hazard information pamphlet before any lease obligation attaches. 40 CFR 745.107(a)(1) names it: the EPA document Protect Your Family From Lead in Your Home (EPA No. 747-K-94-001) or an equivalent pamphlet approved for use in that State by EPA. This is a separate duty from the disclosure form, and failing it is a separate violation supporting independent damages. Handing over a beautifully executed disclosure without the pamphlet is a violation.

Where to get it. The pamphlet is published jointly by EPA, HUD, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission and is free at epa.gov/lead. It is available in English, Spanish, and additional languages. EPA has refreshed the pamphlet in recent years; deliver the current edition rather than a decade-old PDF sitting in your templates folder.

Language. 40 CFR 745.113(b) requires the disclosure elements to be given “in the language of the contract (e.g., English, Spanish)”. An English lease takes the English pamphlet; a Spanish lease takes the Spanish edition. New Hampshire’s mill cities have significant Spanish-speaking and refugee-resettlement tenant populations, and landlords marketing to non-English-speaking tenants should match the pamphlet to the lease language, not to the conversation.

Delivery. Hand delivery with the lessee initialing receipt is the gold standard. Electronic delivery is permitted subject to the E-SIGN conditions covered below. What does not satisfy the rule is pointing at a website: posting a link is not delivery. The pamphlet must be transmitted as a complete document, on paper or electronically.

Existing tenants. The leasing disclosure duty attaches to new leases, not to sitting tenants mid-term. There is one important exception, and it is the renovation rule: if you disturb paint in an occupied pre-1978 unit, the occupants must receive the lead hazard information regardless of when their lease started. That is covered in the renovation section below.

The rule does not require you to test for lead, and it does not require you to remove it. The regulation says so in terms. 40 CFR 745.107(a): “Nothing in this section implies a positive obligation on the seller or lessor to conduct any evaluation or reduction activities.” EPA states the same thing in its public guidance: the disclosure rule does not require landlords to test or remove lead-based paint or lead-based paint hazards, and it does not cancel leasing or sales contracts. It is a disclosure rule, not an abatement rule, and non-disclosure does not void your lease.

The standard is actual knowledge, not constructive knowledge and not a duty to investigate. If the unit has never been tested and you hold no reports, “no knowledge” is the honest, lawful answer, and checking it exposes you to nothing.

The trap is the opposite direction. “No knowledge” becomes fraud when you actually know something:

• You hold a risk assessment, inspection report, or abatement record for the unit or the building.
• A previous tenant’s child had an elevated blood-lead result traced to the unit — in New Hampshire, the exact event that triggers an RSA 130-A:5 investigation.
• DHHS has issued you an order under RSA 130-A:7, or you bought a property already subject to one.
• A code-enforcement notice, insurance report, or contractor flagged deteriorated paint.
• You know the property was tested and the report is inconvenient, so you never collected it.

Note the asymmetry the rule creates. Testing is optional; disclosing is not. A landlord who tests and finds lead must disclose it, and many owners conclude — rationally — that they would rather not know. That is lawful under the federal rule. What is not lawful is knowing and papering over it, because 42 U.S.C. 4852d(b)(3) attaches its treble-damages remedy to knowing violations, and a fact-finder deciding what you knew will look at every document in your file.

New Hampshire sharpens this calculus in a way no other state on this site quite matches, and it is worth pausing on. RSA 130-A:18 makes “evidence of actions taken or not taken by the owner of a pre-1978 rental property or childcare facility in compliance with applicable public health laws and regulations concerning lead” admissible on the question of reasonable care or negligence. The deliberate-ignorance strategy is lawful as against the federal disclosure rule, and simultaneously it is the sort of “action not taken” that a New Hampshire plaintiff will ask a jury to weigh. Those two things are not in conflict, but a landlord who reads only the federal half of the chain will badly misjudge the risk.

This is the most widespread error on the lead-disclosure internet, it is currently printed on a ranking New Hampshire law firm page, and it is worth being precise about — because 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. The statute behind it, 42 U.S.C. 4852d(a)(1)(C), is scoped the same way.

Now read the lessor rules. 40 CFR 745.113(b) — the six elements listed earlier — contains no inspection-opportunity item. Neither does the EPA lessor disclosure form. And the sales list at 745.113(a) proves the omission is deliberate rather than an oversight: element (a)(5) requires “[a] statement by the purchaser that he/she has either: (i) Received the opportunity to conduct the risk assessment or inspection required by § 745.110(a); or (ii) Waived the opportunity.” The drafters wrote that item, put it on the sales list, and did not put it on the lease list. There is no lessee equivalent anywhere in the subpart.

What this means for you. A New Hampshire landlord owes a prospective tenant no statutory inspection window. You may offer one voluntarily, and doing so is a perfectly 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 that documents a fictitious waiver is worse than one that stays silent: it is an inaccurate statement on a document every party signs certifying accuracy under 745.113(b)(6). The generator below prints no inspection line, and that is not an omission — it is the rule.

Complete the fields below to generate a federally compliant New Hampshire 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 New Hampshire tenant screening laws guide covers what you may check at application.

40 CFR 745.113(c)(1) requires the lessor, and any agent, to retain a copy of the completed attachment or the lease containing the required information for no less than three years from the commencement of the leasing period. That is the entire legal requirement, and it is also the single highest-leverage thing in this whole guide, because the signed disclosure is the only artefact that proves you complied.

Think about how a lead dispute actually unfolds. A tenant alleges no disclosure. There is no agency database to consult; nothing gets filed anywhere. The dispute reduces to whether you can produce a signed document. If you can, the claim usually ends. If you cannot, you are defending a knowing-violation allegation with your word against theirs, and the statute puts treble damages and fee-shifting on the other side of that argument.

Three years is a records floor, not a liability sunset. This is a distinction competing pages blur, and the regulation is unusually explicit about it. 40 CFR 745.113(c)(2): the recordkeeping requirement “is not intended to place any limitations on civil suits under the Act, or to otherwise affect a lessee’s or purchaser’s rights under the civil penalty provisions of 42 U.S.C. 4852d(b)(3).” Read that for exactly what it says and no more: it means the three-year rule does not cut down a tenant’s civil rights. It does not say that the passage of three years is no defence to anything, and this page will not extend it that far — limitation periods come from other law entirely. What (c)(2) tells you is simply that discarding the file on day 1,096 does not extinguish anybody’s claim; it only extinguishes your evidence.

A New Hampshire-specific reason to keep it longer. RSA 130-A:18 makes evidence of actions taken or not taken in compliance with public health lead law admissible on reasonable care. A signed disclosure, a note of the pamphlet edition, and a record of what you handed over are precisely such evidence — and a lead-exposure claim involving a young child can surface years after the tenancy ends. Three years is the federal floor. The property file is the sensible unit of retention.

Do not confuse this with the grant covenant. New Hampshire Housing runs lead hazard reduction grant and loan programmes, and those carry their own “3-Year Compliance Period” for participating rental property owners. That is a condition of the funding — about keeping units affordable and available — not the federal records rule. The two share a number and nothing else. AI answers merge them regularly.

What belongs in the file:

• The executed disclosure with every party’s initials, signatures, and dates.
• A note identifying which pamphlet edition was delivered, and how.
• Copies of every record and report you handed to the lessee.
• The lease itself, if the disclosure was inserted rather than attached.
• For electronic delivery: the consent record and the delivery or access log.
• Any RSA 130-A:7 order, risk assessment, or clearance documentation touching the property.

Electronic delivery and signature are permitted. The Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, 15 U.S.C. 7001, gives an electronic signature and an electronic record the same legal effect as ink and paper, and EPA has recognised that the lead disclosure may be delivered and signed electronically.

The conditions are the ordinary E-SIGN ones, and they are not onerous:

• Consent. The tenant agrees to transact electronically. Build it into your application flow rather than assuming it.
• Complete documents, not links. Both the disclosure and the pamphlet must be transmitted as documents the tenant actually receives. A URL in an email is not delivery, and this is the most common electronic-delivery failure.
• Retention capability. The tenant must be able to keep a copy in a form they can retain and reproduce.
• Timing is unchanged. Electronic or not, delivery must precede the tenant’s obligation under the lease.
• Keep the audit trail. The consent record, timestamps, and the delivery log belong in the file alongside the signed disclosure for the full three years.

One caution specific to e-signature platforms: many lease packets are assembled from vendor template libraries, and those libraries are exactly where the phantom “10-day inspection” checkbox lives. If your platform’s lead addendum contains an inspection-opportunity item, it has given you the sales form. Have it removed rather than initialling around it.

Disclosure governs lease-up. The moment you disturb paint in an occupied pre-1978 unit, a different rule takes over: the Renovation, Repair and Painting rule at 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart E. New Hampshire landlords meet this rule far more often than the disclosure rule, because the housing stock is old and always under repair.

Scope. 40 CFR 745.82(a) applies Subpart E to all renovations performed for compensation in target housing and child-occupied facilities. The exceptions are narrow and evidentiary: a written determination by a certified inspector or risk assessor that the affected components are lead-free;