Free Tennessee Sublease Agreement

Tennessee does not give tenants a right to sublet. What it gives is a three-day route against an unauthorized subtenant — written twice, once in each of the state’s two landlord-tenant chapters, with different machinery in each.

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Watch: Tennessee Sublease Agreement explained

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This is the detail that most summaries drop, and it changes who is at risk. Neither provision makes an unauthorized sublet by itself a three-day matter. § 66-7-109(f) applies “if the termination of tenancy is for refusal by the unauthorized subtenant or other unauthorized occupant to vacate the premises”, and § 66-28-517(a)(4) reaches a person who “refuses to vacate the premises after entering the premises as an unauthorized subtenant”. Both are aimed at someone who has been asked to go and has not gone. A subtenant who moved in without permission but leaves when the position is explained has not engaged either section.

• The property address including unit number, and the county.
• The names of the tenant (as sublessor) and the subtenant.
• The sublease term, ending on or before your own lease ends.
• The rent, the due date, and how it is paid.
• Any deposit, and how it will be handled and returned.
• Which utilities the subtenant pays.
• A reference to the landlord’s written permission and its date.
• An acknowledgment that the subtenant has received the head lease.
• Signatures and dates from both parties.

• Citing the three-day sublet rule as “§ 66-28-517(f)”. That subsection is about the failure to seek an injunction not being usable as evidence. The sentence people mean is § 66-7-109(f).
• Applying § 66-7-109 in a URLTA county. Subsection (g) excludes it there outright. In those counties the provision is § 66-28-517(a)(4).
• Dropping the refusal-to-vacate condition. Neither three-day route is triggered by an unauthorized sublet on its own. Both require a refusal to leave.
• Reading three days as a cure period. Both provisions describe notice terminating the tenancy, not a window to obtain consent after the fact.
• Sending a vague notice in a URLTA county. § 66-28-517(b) requires the notice to specifically detail the violation and makes it effective only from receipt.
• Forgetting you became a landlord. § 66-28-104(5) includes a sublessor in the definition, so the Act’s landlord duties run from you to your subtenant.

Your rental agreement answers that. Tennessee’s Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act, T.C.A. chapter 66-28, does not give tenants a general right to sublet, so a clause requiring the landlord’s consent is effective. Where the Act does speak is on the other side of the problem — what a landlord may do about a subtenant who was never authorised.

This is the part that decides which law is yours, and it is easy to get backwards.

Chapter 66-28 is the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act as adopted in Tennessee. It is not automatically statewide. Chapter 66-7 is the general leases chapter. And the two are mutually exclusive on this point, because § 66-7-109(g) says so directly: “Nothing in this section shall apply to rental property located in any county governed by the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act.”

That is the whole test, and it is a population figure fixed to the 2010 federal census rather than to current numbers. In a county above the line, the URLTA governs and § 66-28-517(a)(4) is your route; in a county at or below it, chapter 66-7 governs and § 66-7-109(f) is.

Subsection (c) also carves out particular arrangements from the Act — institutional occupancy, occupancy under a contract of sale, transient occupancy, and certain others — and (d) addresses federally regulated housing. So a property in a qualifying county can still fall outside the URLTA, and because § 66-7-109(g) excludes chapter 66-7 from every URLTA county, it is worth confirming which regime you are in rather than assuming.

Read the conditional clause, because it is the whole of the provision’s reach. The three days is not available because someone sublet without permission. It is available because an unauthorized occupant has been asked to leave and has refused. Those are different facts, and only the second one engages the section.

For context on how short three days is in this chapter: § 66-7-109(a)(1) sets fourteen days as sufficient notice for a residential tenant where the ground is unpaid rent, damage beyond normal wear and tear, or a violent or dangerous act — and § 66-7-109(b) requires thirty days for all other lease defaults. Note also § 66-7-109(c): the section does not apply at all where the rental period is less than fourteen days.

Where the URLTA does govern, the unauthorized subtenant appears in the section headed “Termination by landlord for violence or threats to health, safety, or welfare of persons or property — Unauthorized subtenant or occupant”, as the fourth of four grounds.

Same three days, same refusal-to-vacate trigger, but the mechanics differ in ways that matter. The clock runs from receipt, not from sending. And the section carries protections the other chapter does not.

(b) The notice has to say what was done. It “shall specifically detail the violation which has been committed and shall be effective only from the date of receipt of the notice by the tenant”. A vague notice, or one whose receipt cannot be shown, has not started the clock.

(c) The tenant can go to court immediately. On receipt of the notice the tenant “shall be entitled to immediate access to any court of competent jurisdiction for the purpose of obtaining a temporary or permanent injunction against such termination by the landlord”. Three days is short precisely because this door is open.

(d) No self-help. Nothing in the section allows a landlord to recover or take possession “by action or otherwise including willful diminution of services … by interrupting or causing interruption of electric, gas or other essential service”, except on abandonment or surrender.

(e) Bad faith is expensive. If the landlord’s termination under the provision “is willful and not in good faith, the tenant may in addition recover actual damages sustained by the tenant plus reasonable attorney’s fees”.

And a point of order worth making because the mistake is common: § 66-28-517(f) is not the sublease rule. It provides that failure to bring or obtain an injunction may not be used as evidence in an action to recover possession. If you see the three-day sublet sentence cited as “§ 66-28-517(f)”, the citation is wrong — that sentence is § 66-7-109(f).

Neither provision is framed as an opportunity to cure by belatedly obtaining consent. Both are about a person who has already been asked to leave. A tenant or occupant who receives one and spends three days negotiating has spent the clock rather than stopped it.

The useful response is immediate: produce the written permission if it exists, and speak to the landlord straight away if it does not — and in a URLTA county, know that § 66-28-517(c) puts a court within reach on the same day.

T.C.A. § 66-28-104(5) defines “landlord” as the owner, lessor, or sublessor of the dwelling unit or the building of which it is a part. That single word changes your position materially.

You remain a tenant as against the person you rent from. You simultaneously become a landlord as against the person you sublet to, carrying the Act’s duties in that direction. Deposits, notice, access and the condition of the unit are now questions you answer as well as ask. Most sublease disputes that turn ugly do so because the sublessor never registered that the relationship runs both ways.

A subtenant’s occupancy is carved out of the head lease. Its length is capped by the head lease, its terms are constrained by the head lease, and its survival depends on the head tenancy continuing. Yet the subtenant is usually shown only the sublease.

Give them a copy of the head lease. It costs nothing, it lets them see the clauses that will govern how they live there, and it removes the most common complaint a subtenant has when something goes wrong — that nobody told them.

There are usually two deposits in play and they are not the same money. The one you paid your landlord secures your lease and comes back to you, at the end, according to your lease and the Act. The one your subtenant pays you secures the sublease and comes back to them, from you.

Keep them separate, say in the sublease when and how the subtenant’s deposit is returned, and do not plan on using their deposit to cover your own end-of-tenancy deductions. If the unit is damaged, you are answering to the landlord for all of it, and recovering from the subtenant is a separate exercise.

If you are leaving temporarily and coming back, that is a sublease. If you are leaving for good and want your name off the lease, you need an assignment plus a release from the landlord — and only the release ends your liability. If someone is joining you while you stay, that is an occupancy question, and § 66-28-517 reaches an unauthorized occupant as well as an unauthorized subtenant, so the permission conversation matters either way.

A sublease rarely arrives on its own. Most people reach one because something else has changed — a job in another city, a relationship ending, a lease with months left on it — so it is worth knowing what the alternatives cost before you commit to this one. Our guide to breaking a lease in Tennessee sets out the early-exit routes and what each of them exposes you to, and in some situations ending the tenancy outright is cleaner than running a sublease you will have to manage from a distance.

The two disputes that actually follow a sublease are about money and about possession. On money, the deposit is where most of it happens, and the rules that govern what a landlord may take and when it has to come back are set out in Tennessee security deposit laws — worth reading before you decide what to hold from your subtenant, and before you assume you know what the owner may hold from you.

On possession, the notices and timelines that apply if things go wrong are covered in Tennessee eviction notice laws. You are the landlord in the sublease relationship, so those rules are as likely to be yours to use as to be used against you.

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