Free Ohio Roommate Agreement

A roommate agreement is a contract between the roommates. The landlord is not a party to it and it does not change the lease. Two features of Ohio law make this document more important than it looks. The first is R.C. § 5321.17(C), a mandatory three-day termination for drug activity that can be triggered by someone who is not even a tenant. The second is an absence: Ohio has no domestic-violence lease-termination statute in the Revised Code, and the substitute route does not reach a platonic roommate at all.

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A roommate agreement records what the people sharing a unit have agreed between themselves. It binds them to each other and not to the landlord: everyone named on the rental agreement remains liable for the whole rent where the agreement makes that liability joint and several, and Ohio creates no such rule by statute — “joint and several”, “jointly and severally”, “apportion” and “pro rata” all return zero across chapter 5321. Section 5321.13(A) adds that no provision of the chapter may be modified or waived by any oral or written agreement, which confirms the limit of this document: it operates between the roommates and nowhere else.

• Who is named on the rental agreement, and who is living there without signing
• A conduct clause covering everyone on the premises with a roommate’s consent
• Who is responsible if a guest’s conduct triggers § 5321.17(C)
• An exit route the roommates agree between themselves, since the statute supplies none
• Each roommate’s share of the rent, and who pays the landlord
• Each roommate’s share of the deposit, and a buy-out for anyone leaving first
• The written forwarding address each roommate will give on leaving
• 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

• Assuming only a tenant’s own drug activity matters. Section 5321.17(C) reaches any person in the household and any person on the premises with the consent of the tenant.
• Waiting for a conviction. The subsection operates whether or not anyone has been charged, pleaded guilty or been convicted.
• Assuming Ohio has a domestic-violence lease-termination right. It does not, and the protective-order substitute excludes roommates who are not family or household members as defined.
• Expecting deposit interest at move-out. Section 5321.16(A) pays it annually, and only on the excess above the greater of fifty dollars or one month’s periodic rent, and only where the tenant remains in possession six months or more.
• Forgetting the written forwarding address. Without it the tenant is not entitled to damages or attorney’s fees under § 5321.16(C).

No. Chapter 5321 — twenty-three sections, a 44,118-character body corpus — returns zero occurrences of “roommate”, “co-tenant”, “cotenant”, “co-occupant”, “additional occupant”, “additional adult”, “sublet” and “sublease”. Searching the whole Revised Code for “roommate” produces three hits, none of them in landlord-tenant law.

What the chapter does contain runs the other way. Section 5321.051(A) provides that no tenant shall allow a person subject to certain registration requirements to occupy the premises where those premises are within a thousand feet of a school or child-care premises, and the landlord may then terminate the tenancy of “the tenant and all other occupants”.

On occupancy, there is no statewide number. Chapter 5321 returns zero for “persons per”, “per bedroom”, “maximum number”, “occupancy standard” and “overcrowd”. The only relevant provision found anywhere in the Revised Code is § 4112.024(C), which permits reasonable occupancy standards “based on the number and size of sleeping areas or bedrooms and the overall size of a dwelling unit” — it authorises a standard rather than setting one. Any binding number comes from the lease and the municipal code, and municipal codes were not searched for this page.

Section 5321.17 governs termination of periodic tenancies. Subsections (A) and (B) are ordinary, though they are keyed to different dates: (A) gives seven days’ notice for a week-to-week tenancy, running prior to the termination date specified in the notice, and (B) gives thirty days for a month-to-month, running prior to the periodic rental date. Neither uses the word “written” — which is a genuine drafting choice rather than an oversight, since “written” appears fourteen times across ten other sections of the chapter.

Subsection (C) is different in kind, and narrower than it looks. It bites only on drug activity — a violation of § 5321.05(A)(9), which requires the tenant and persons in the household and on the premises with the tenant’s consent not to violate the controlled-substance prohibitions in R.C. chapters 2925 and 3719 — and only where the landlord has actual knowledge of, or reasonable cause to believe, the drug-activity ground referred to at § 1923.02(A)(6)(a)(i). Within that scope it provides that the landlord shall terminate, on a notice specifying that the tenancy terminates three days after it is given; it reaches conduct by the tenant, by any person in the tenant’s household, or by any person on the residential premises with the consent of the tenant; and it applies whether or not that person has been charged with, pleaded guilty to, or been convicted of anything.

For a roommate group the implication is uncomfortable but simple. The tenancy is not divisible. If subsection (C) is triggered by one roommate’s visitor, the household loses the home — including roommates who were not there, did not know, and could not have prevented it. That is a narrow risk, but it is a total one.

A roommate agreement cannot change any of that as against the landlord. What it can do is allocate the consequences internally: a conduct clause stating what is not permitted on the premises, a guests clause saying who may authorise a visitor and who is answerable for them, and an indemnity so that a roommate whose guest costs everyone the tenancy bears the loss rather than sharing it equally.

Most states in this family have a statute letting a victim of domestic violence end a tenancy early. Ohio does not. That was verified rather than assumed: three separate whole-code searches found nothing, and within chapter 5321 the only two occurrences of “domestic violence” are in the list of shelter accommodation that the chapter excludes from its scope.

What exists instead is the civil protection order. Section 3113.31(E)(1)(b) allows a court to order a respondent to vacate the premises where the residence or household is jointly owned or leased by the respondent and the petitioner. That is a useful power and it is expressly framed for a shared home. But it removes a person; it does not end anyone’s obligation under the lease. The word “tenant” does not appear in § 3113.31 at all.

Its more serious limit is who can use it. Section 3113.31(A)(3) defines a family or household member as a spouse, a person living as a spouse, a cohabitant, a relative, or a person with whom the respondent has a child. Two people who share a flat and nothing else do not fall within that definition. And the stalking civil protection order under § 2903.214 contains no power to order anyone to vacate at all — it is a stay-away order.

One category sits unresolved, and this page leaves it that way. Section 3113.31 also reaches a person the respondent is or was in a dating relationship with, at § 3113.31(A)(8) — but the vacate relief at (E)(1)(b) is prefaced “with respect to a petition involving family or household members”. Whether a dating-relationship petitioner can obtain that order was not established here.

So an Ohio roommate in a purely platonic arrangement has no statutory mechanism to remove the other person from the home and no statutory route out of the lease. That is precisely the situation this agreement should address, with an agreed exit: how much notice, what the leaver owes, how the deposit share is handled, and whether the others will look for a replacement.

Section 5321.16 has been in force unamended since 1974 and it is frequently misdescribed. The interest provision in subsection (A) pays five per cent per annum, but only on the amount exceeding the greater of fifty dollars or one month’s periodic rent, only where the tenant remains in possession for six months or more, and it is “computed and paid annually” — not accrued and settled at move-out.

Subsection (B) requires the landlord to itemise and identify any deductions in a written notice “within thirty days after termination of the rental agreement and delivery of possession”. Note the conjunction: both events are needed. And the tenant must provide a forwarding address in writing, failing which they are not entitled to damages or attorney’s fees under subsection (C).

What the section does not do is divide anything between roommates. Within § 5321.16 the terms “apportion”, “co-tenant”, “roommate”, “occupant” and “each tenant” all appear zero times. The clock runs from termination of the agreement plus delivery of possession, so one roommate moving out does not start it, and the departing roommate needs a buy-out from the others rather than a claim on the landlord.

This matters more in Ohio than in some states. Section 5321.01(A) defines a tenant as a person “entitled under a rental agreement to the use and occupancy… to the exclusion of others”. A person who never signed is not excluded from the chapter by name — the chapter simply never reaches them.

The practical consequences are substantial: no repair remedy under § 5321.07, no deposit claim under § 5321.16, and no retaliation protection under § 5321.02. Neither “guest” nor “invitee” appears anywhere in the chapter, and “occupant” is never defined, so there is no statutory point at which an off-lease roommate acquires those rights.

Being outside chapter 5321 does not, however, make an off-lease roommate unremovable. Chapter 1923 supplies eviction grounds aimed squarely at occupants — § 1923.02(A)(14) and (A)(15) — and § 1923.01(C)(1) uses a wider “use or occupancy” definition of tenant than § 5321.01(A)’s “use and occupancy”. The two should not be conflated.

If the off-lease roommate is paying rent, that person’s only protection is the agreement they have with the person who signed. It should say what they are paying for, what notice they get, and what happens to their deposit contribution.

This document binds the roommates to each other. The landlord is not a party to it, is not bound by it, and section 5321.13(A) confirms that the chapter’s provisions cannot be modified or waived by agreement in any event. Everyone named on the rental agreement can still be pursued for the whole rent. What the agreement does in Ohio is fill two gaps the statute leaves wide open: who bears the loss if someone’s guest ends the tenancy, and how a roommate gets out when the law provides no way.

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 Ohio 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 Ohio 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 Ohio landlord tenant laws.

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