Free New Mexico Lead Paint Disclosure

A New Mexico 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 Mexico imposes no separate lead paint disclosure statute — the duty here is purely federal. What New Mexico does add is an independent habitability duty under NMSA 1978 Section 47-8-20 for deteriorated paint, covered in our New Mexico habitability laws guide. Generate the form below, then read on for what New Mexico adds on top of the federal rule.

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New Mexico 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 Mexico 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.

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. A pre-1978 New Mexico rental leased without one exposes the landlord to government civil penalties and to a tenant’s private action for triple damages plus fees. Compliance takes fifteen minutes; non-compliance is the most expensive paperwork failure in pre-1978 rental practice.

No. New Mexico has no state-specific lead paint disclosure statute, and this page will not invent one. Unlike a handful of states that layer their own lead registry, testing, or certification regimes on top of the federal rule, New Mexico does not. Every substantive requirement described on this page comes from federal law: 42 U.S.C. 4852d, 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart F, and 24 CFR Part 35 Subpart A.

This matters because a lot of “New Mexico lead paint disclosure” pages imply a New Mexico rule exists, then describe the federal one. If you are searching for the New Mexico statute number, there isn’t one to find. New Mexico is not a close call, either: the National Conference of State Legislatures maintains a fifty-state table of state lead statutes — Alabama’s Lead Reduction Act, Ohio’s lead poisoning prevention chapter, Vermont’s essential maintenance practices regime, Massachusetts’ lead law and the rest — and New Mexico has no entry in it at all. New Mexico did not narrow its lead law; it never enacted one. What New Mexico contributes is three adjacent things worth knowing:

• Habitability — NMSA 1978 Section 47-8-20. The landlord’s duty to keep the premises fit for occupancy applies independently of disclosure. Deteriorated lead paint can be a habitability defect on its own, whether or not you disclosed it. Disclosure does not cure a hazard; it only discloses one.
• Owner disclosure — NMSA 1978 Section 47-8-19. This is the disclosure the Uniform Owner-Resident Relations Act actually requires, and it is worth knowing precisely because it is so narrow. The owner must disclose, in writing at or before the start of the residency, the name, address and telephone number of the person authorised to manage the premises and of the owner or the person authorised to act for the owner for service of process. That is the list. Lead is not on it. New Mexico’s statutory disclosure duty and the federal lead disclosure duty are separate obligations, and satisfying one says nothing about the other.
• Local programs. We found no New Mexico city or county ordinance imposing a lead-safe certification or lead rental-registry duty of the kind Cleveland, Toledo, Philadelphia and Rochester impose — nothing in Albuquerque, Santa Fe or Las Cruces that we could identify. That is a finding, not a guarantee: municipal codes change and we are not able to verify every ordinance in the state. Check with local code enforcement before assuming none applies, but do not let a national page tell you New Mexico has one.

The New Mexico Department of Health administers the state’s childhood lead-poisoning prevention work, but that is a public-health surveillance function, not a landlord disclosure mandate. Blood-lead results are reported to the department by laboratories and health professionals — the reporting duty runs to clinicians and labs, not to you, and it creates no filing duty for a landlord. Because the obligation is federal rather than state-specific, the same disclosure applies to a rental in any state — our federal lead-based paint disclosure form is the generic version of the New Mexico form on this page.

EPA, not a New Mexico agency, runs the lead programmes here

This is the one genuinely New Mexico-specific operational fact on this page, and it is the mirror image of what a landlord in an authorised state faces. EPA authorises individual states to run the lead abatement/evaluation and renovation (RRP) programmes in place of the federal programme. New Mexico is not one of them. EPA’s own guidance directs that if you do work in Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, South Carolina, South Dakota or Wyoming, you apply to EPA for firm certification. New Mexico likewise follows the federal RRP rule rather than adopting its own.

The practical consequence: when you hire a renovator for a pre-1978 Albuquerque duplex, the certification you should ask to see is an EPA firm certification, and the abatement contractor you engage is certified through EPA, not through a New Mexico licensing board. Landlords in states such as North Carolina, Wisconsin or Rhode Island deal with a state agency; a New Mexico landlord deals with EPA Region 6 directly. A contractor who waves a “state lead licence” at you in New Mexico is describing something that does not exist — what does exist is the New Mexico contractor licence under the Construction Industries Licensing Act, which is a general trade licence and is not a lead certification. Do not accept one as the other.

The federal Lead Disclosure Rule itself — the six required elements of 40 CFR 745.113(b), the pre-1978 target-housing trigger and its exemptions, the EPA pamphlet, the no-duty-to-test rule, the three-year record rule, electronic delivery and the federal penalties — is set out on the national lead-based paint disclosure page. This page covers what New Mexico adds on top of it.

Complete the fields below to generate a federally compliant New Mexico 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.

The disclosure rule governs leasing. A different rule governs work on the building, and New Mexico landlords routinely comply with the first while breaching the second.

The RRP rule. The EPA Renovation, Repair and Painting rule at 40 CFR Part 745 Subpart E applies to renovation, repair, or painting that disturbs painted surfaces in pre-1978 target housing. Above the de minimis threshold, the work must be performed by an EPA-certified firm using certified renovators and lead-safe work practices — containment, prohibited practices such as open-flame burning and uncontained power sanding, and cleaning verification. This is not a paperwork rule; it dictates how the work is physically done, and it applies to a landlord’s own maintenance staff, not just outside contractors.

The 60-day information duty. Where the renovation affects an occupied pre-1978 unit, the occupants must receive lead hazard information no more than 60 days before work begins — the EPA pamphlet for renovation, delivered to the tenants in the unit. This duty runs to sitting tenants who already have a lease and already received their leasing disclosure years ago.

Common areas trigger building-wide notice. If the work affects common areas of a pre-1978 multi-unit building, notice must go to every unit in the building describing the nature and location of the work and the dates it is expected to begin and end. Every unit — not merely the ones adjacent to the work.

Note also that entering an occupied unit to carry out that work is its own compliance question under the Uniform Owner-Resident Relations Act — see our New Mexico landlord entry laws guide for the notice a landlord owes before entering to renovate.

Why it matters in New Mexico. New Mexico’s older urban stock turns over and gets refreshed constantly, and repainting between tenancies is the most routine task in the business. Scraping and repainting a 1958 duplex’s window trim with in-house staff and no certification is an RRP violation with its own penalty exposure, entirely independent of a flawless leasing disclosure. And there is a second-order effect: work that disturbs paint can create the very hazard you then have to disclose to the next tenant, and it can generate the records that make “no knowledge” unavailable to you going forward.

Federal disclosure is the compliance floor, not the whole picture. New Mexico habitability law applies independently to the underlying condition of the paint.

NMSA 1978 Section 47-8-20 sets the owner’s obligations, and its wording matters here. Subsection A(1) requires the owner to substantially comply with requirements of the applicable minimum housing codes materially affecting health and safety, and A(2) to make repairs and do whatever is necessary to put and keep the premises in a safe condition as provided by applicable law. A(3) extends the safe-condition duty to common areas — which is where lead hazards in an older New Mexico multi-unit building most often sit. Deteriorated lead-based paint — peeling, chipping, chalking, cracking, or damaged — can rise to a defect under that safe-condition duty on its own.

The New Mexico wrinkle competing pages miss. Section 47-8-20(B) provides that where a minimum housing code applies to the premises, the owner’s maximum duty under the section is determined by A(1) — substantial compliance with that code. So in a New Mexico jurisdiction with an applicable housing code, the code sets the ceiling of the statutory habitability duty rather than a free-floating fitness standard, and what the local code says about deteriorated paint does real work. Section 47-8-20(B) also states expressly that the obligations imposed by the section are not intended to change existing tort law in the state — so a negligence claim over an actual lead exposure runs on its own track, not through the statute.

The distinction landlords miss: disclosure and habitability are independent. Disclosing a hazard does not licence you to leave it in place. A perfectly executed disclosure that says “known lead-based paint present, peeling in the second bedroom” is a complete defence to a disclosure claim and simultaneously a written admission in a habitability claim. Deteriorated paint in a pre-1978 New Mexico unit should be remediated by a certified firm before re-rental — both to comply with the RRP rule and to remove the habitability exposure that disclosure does nothing to cure.

The federal Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. 3601 et seq., adds one more edge. It prohibits familial-status discrimination, and a landlord who steers families with young children away from pre-1978 units to dodge lead obligations has swapped a disclosure problem for a fair-housing complaint — a considerably worse trade. See our New Mexico tenant screening laws guide for where screening practice and familial status intersect.

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