Free West Virginia Lead Paint Disclosure

A West Virginia 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). West Virginia imposes no separate lead paint disclosure statute — the duty here is purely federal. West Virginia’s own lead law, the Lead Abatement Act at W. Va. Code Chapter 16, Article 35, is a contractor-licensing and abatement regime, not a landlord disclosure duty, and the state’s landlord overlay is the habitability duty in our West Virginia habitability laws guide. Generate the form below, then read on for exactly what the rule requires.

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West Virginia 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 West Virginia 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 West Virginia 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. West Virginia has no state-specific lead paint disclosure statute, and this page will not invent one. 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 is the single most misreported fact on the West Virginia lead-paint internet, and it is worth being precise about, because the automated answers now circulating get it wrong in three distinct ways.

West Virginia does have a lead statute — but it is not a disclosure statute. The Lead Abatement Act at W. Va. Code Chapter 16, Article 35 is a real, in-force West Virginia law. Read section by section, though, it is a contractor-licensing and abatement regime administered by the state Bureau for Public Health. Its provisions cover a short title (16-35-1), legislative findings, definitions, the powers of the director, childhood screening, the lead discipline license, an abatement contractor’s duties, exemptions, notification of elevated blood-lead levels, notification of abatement projects, training-course accreditation, license discipline, a special revenue account, and penalties. Nowhere in the article is there a lessor, a lease, a pamphlet, or a disclosure obligation. It does not tell a landlord to hand a tenant anything before a lease. Confusing the Lead Abatement Act with a lead disclosure duty is the classic error, and it is exactly the conflation a lead-contractor certification regime invites: certifying who may disturb lead is a different thing from telling a tenant what you know about it.

What West Virginia actually adds for a landlord falls into three buckets, none of which is disclosure:

• Habitability — W. Va. Code 37-6-30. The landlord’s duty to deliver and maintain the premises “in a fit and habitable condition” and to comply with applicable health, safety, fire, and housing codes 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. This is covered in depth in the state-overlay section below.
• The abatement licensing regime — W. Va. Code 16-35-5. It is unlawful in West Virginia to carry out a lead-risk assessment, inspection, or abatement activity without an appropriate lead discipline license. A West Virginia landlord cannot lawfully self-perform a lead inspection or abatement; that work goes to a licensed professional. This constrains how you respond to a hazard, not what you disclose.
• Local programs. Some West Virginia municipalities run rental-registration or licensing programs that can add inspection or notice obligations. These are municipal, not statewide, and they are not lead disclosure duties. Check with local code enforcement or the county health department before assuming none applies — but do not assume a city has a lead disclosure ordinance simply because an aggregator asserts one.

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, 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.

“Target housing” is the federal term for property subject to the rule. The definition at 40 CFR 745.103 is residential dwellings constructed before 1 January 1978, subject to the narrow exclusions in the next section.

Why 1978 — and which 1978 date actually governs. The operative cutoff comes from the definition itself: 40 CFR 745.103 defines target housing as 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 applies to paint manufactured after 27 February 1978, which is not the same date. 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 does tell you which cite to trust: for whether your unit is covered, read 745.103, not the CPSC rule. Housing constructed from 1 January 1978 onward sits outside the disclosure regime entirely.

How to verify the build year in West Virginia. The county assessor’s record is the fastest authoritative source, and every West Virginia county assessor maintains it. 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 1962 building stripped to the studs and rebuilt in 2001 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.

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. This has a practical consequence for records, covered below: a building-wide evaluation is disclosable to every tenant in the building, not just the one whose unit it sampled.

West Virginia context. West Virginia has a large share of older housing stock, concentrated in the established neighbourhoods of Charleston, Huntington, Wheeling, Parkersburg, Morgantown, and the coalfield and Ohio-Valley towns, where much of the rental inventory predates the trigger. Portfolio landlords with mixed-vintage holdings are the ones who get caught, because the compliance answer differs unit by unit. When in doubt, verify against the county assessor record rather than relying on the exemption.

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. Verify against the current rule before relying on any of them.

• Housing built in 1978 or later (40 CFR 745.103). Not target housing at all.
• Zero-bedroom dwellings (40 CFR 745.103, definitional). A 0-bedroom dwelling is one “in which the living area is not separated from the sleeping area” — the rule expressly includes efficiencies, studio apartments, dormitory housing, military barracks, and rentals of individual rooms in residential dwellings. This exclusion is unconditional: it carries no child condition. A studio rented to a family with a young child is still not target housing. This is the point competing charts most often get wrong, because they wrongly graft the elderly-or-disabled child condition onto the zero-bedroom limb. Read the definition literally — the exception clause is “housing for the elderly or persons with disabilities (unless any child who is less than 6 years of age resides or is expected to reside in such housing) or any 0-bedroom dwelling.” The parenthetical sits inside the elderly-or-disabled limb and closes before “or any 0-bedroom dwelling”. Only one of the two definitional exclusions is conditioned on a child.
• Housing for the elderly or persons with disabilities (40 CFR 745.103, definitional), where the housing is specifically designated as such — unless a child under six resides or is expected to reside there. This is the exclusion that carries the child condition; the zero-bedroom one does not.
• Short-term leases of 100 days or less (40 CFR 745.101(c)), where no lease renewal or extension can occur. Vacation and short-term rentals typically qualify; a month-to-month tenancy does not, because it renews.
• Certified lead-free housing (40 CFR 745.101(b)). Property inspected by a certified inspector and found free of lead-based paint. 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(b); pages that cite 745.113(b) here have followed the wrong thread. 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.

Federal law requires the lessor to give the prospective lessee the EPA pamphlet Protect Your Family From Lead in Your Home before any lease obligation attaches. 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 refreshed the pamphlet in recent years; deliver the current edition rather than a decade-old PDF sitting in your templates folder.

Language. The disclosure must be provided in the language of the contract. An English lease takes the English pamphlet; a Spanish lease takes the Spanish edition. 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. EPA states this plainly: the disclosure rule does not require sellers or 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 the 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.
• 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. 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. Note too a West Virginia wrinkle: if you do decide to have the unit assessed, W. Va. Code 16-35-5 requires that a lead-risk assessment or inspection be performed by someone holding the appropriate lead discipline license — you cannot lawfully do it yourself.

This is the most widespread error on the lead-disclosure internet, 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 the same: it grants the purchaser the opportunity.

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. The 10-day window simply does not exist on the leasing side of the rule.

What this means for you. A West Virginia landlord owes a prospective tenant no statutory inspection window. You may offer one voluntarily, and doing so is a 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.

Complete the fields below to generate a federally compliant West Virginia 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.

40 CFR 745.113(c) requires the lessor to retain a copy of the completed disclosure for no less than three years from the commencement date 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.

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/access log.

The rule itself says the three years is not the measure of your exposure. 40 CFR 745.113(c)(2) provides that 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 carefully, because it is the sentence that should govern your retention policy: three years is how long you are required to keep the file, not how long you can be sued. The tenant’s treble-damages right is expressly unaffected by the retention clock running out. A landlord who shreds the file on the three-year anniversary has discharged the duty to retain while keeping every bit of the liability that file would have defended.

Practical retention advice. Three years is a floor, not a target. West Virginia’s limitation periods for the underlying claims run longer than three years, and a lead-poisoning claim brought on behalf of a minor can surface many years after the tenancy ends. Retention is nearly free; destroy the file on the three-year anniversary and you have optimised for the wrong risk. Keep it for the life of ownership and hand the file over at sale.

Electronic disclosure and e-signature are permitted. The signed electronic disclosure is the same legally binding document as a paper one, under the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, 15 U.S.C. 7001. Almost no competing guide states the conditions EPA attaches, so here they are.

If you provide the required disclosure information electronically, EPA expects you to give the tenant:

• A clear statement of the right to receive paper documents. Electronic delivery is the tenant’s option, not your default imposition.
• The procedure to withdraw consent, and the consequences of withdrawing. Spelled out, not implied.
• How to access and retain the electronic records. A file the tenant cannot open or keep has not been delivered.
• Consent demonstrating they can actually access the materials. You need affirmative consent showing the tenant can receive the forms in the format you are using.

The underlying principle: the use of electronic technology must give the tenant complete access to all disclosure materials. A portal link buried in a welcome email, a PDF the tenant cannot download, or an e-sign flow that shows the signature page without the pamphlet all fail that test even though a signature comes back.

Retention is identical. Three years, same as paper — but electronic records need a real home. An e-signature vendor account you stop paying for is not a retention plan. Export the executed PDF and the audit trail into storage you control.

Because so many pages blur West Virginia’s own lead statute together with the federal disclosure duty, it is worth reading the state law on its own terms. The Lead Abatement Act at W. Va. Code Chapter 16, Article 35 governs who may disturb lead and how. It never governs what a landlord must tell a tenant. Keeping the two apart is what stops you from either inventing a state duty that does not exist or missing a state duty that does.

Licensing — 16-35-5. It is unlawful for any individual to carry out a lead-risk assessment, inspection, or abatement activity for which they do not hold an appropriate lead discipline license. For a landlord, the practical takeaway is that lead work — testing, assessment, or abatement — is not a do-it-yourself job in West Virginia. It goes to a licensed professional. This does not change your disclosure answer, but it changes how you lawfully respond once a hazard is on your radar.

Renovation is not abatement — 16-35-7(b). The Act’s definition of abatement excludes renovation, remodeling, or other activity undertaken to repair or restore a structure even where it incidentally reduces lead. Ordinary repainting and repair therefore sits under the federal Renovation, Repair and Painting rule (below), not the state abatement article — two separate regimes for two separate kinds of work.

Owner notification — 16-35-9. Where a lead abatement project is to occur, each owner or other person responsible for the building’s operation must notify the state division before the project. This is a real West Virginia owner duty — but it is a pre-abatement notification duty to the state, not a disclosure to a tenant, and it only bites when actual abatement is underway.

State penalties — 16-35-13. The Act carries its own penalties, and unlike the federal figures they are fixed in statute rather than inflation-adjusted: a civil penalty of not less than $250 and not more than $5,000 per separate violation; a willful failure to stop after a cease-and-desist order carries $10,000 to $25,000 for an initial offence and $25,000 to $50,000 for a subsequent one; and a criminal misdemeanor exposure of $250 to $50,000 and/or up to one year. Read those numbers for what they are: statutory penalties for abatement and licensing violations, not for a disclosure failure. The federal disclosure penalties are a different track entirely, described in the penalties section below.

The rest of the article rounds out the public-health picture: 16-35-3 defines a “child-occupied building” as a pre-1978 structure a child aged six or under visits regularly, and 16-35-4a establishes a statewide screening program for children under six. Useful context, none of it a landlord disclosure duty.

The disclosure rule governs leasing. A different rule governs work on the building, and West Virginia 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 renovation pamphlet, 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 — see our West Virginia landlord entry laws guide for the notice a landlord owes before entering to renovate.

Why it matters in West Virginia. West Virginia’s older 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. If the job crosses from renovation into full abatement, remember the state line from the previous section: abatement work is licensed under W. Va. Code 16-35-5 and triggers the 16-35-9 notification.

Search this topic and you will be told the disclosure penalty is a specific number per violation. You will see several different numbers, none dated, most copied from an old page. Here is the accurate structure, which has two entirely separate federal limbs — and note that these are distinct from the West Virginia state abatement penalties in 16-35-13 above.

Limb one: the tenant’s private action, 42 U.S.C. 4852d(b)(3). Any person who knowingly violates the section is jointly and severally liable to the purchaser or lessee for three times the amount of damages that person incurred. This multiplier is written into the statute; it does not move with inflation. Section 4852d(b)(4) adds that a court may award court costs together with reasonable attorney fees and expert witness fees to a prevailing plaintiff. The fee-shifting is what makes small disclosure violations economically worth suing over.

Limb two: government civil money penalties. These are assessed by EPA and HUD, and they are inflation-adjusted — annually, under the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act, with the operative amounts published in the table at 40 CFR 19.4 for EPA-assessed penalties. Knowing violations can also carry criminal exposure.

The asymmetry is what should drive behaviour. Completing this form correctly costs fifteen minutes. The downside is a treble-damages judgment with the tenant’s legal fees attached, plus an agency penalty, plus — if a child was actually poisoned — a tort claim in which the disclosure violation supplies a ready-made negligence theory.

EPA and HUD share enforcement of the disclosure rule. EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics and HUD’s Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes run the programme jointly, and enforcement has historically concentrated on larger landlords and property managers, where a single practice failure replicates across hundreds of tenancies and produces a large per-violation multiplier.

How a case starts. Rarely with an inspector at the door. Usually one of four ways: a tenant reports a missing disclosure; a child’s elevated blood-lead result triggers a health-department investigation that works backwards to the paperwork; a private lawsuit’s discovery exposes a systemic gap; or an agency initiative targets a market and requests files from a portfolio owner. In West Virginia the elevated blood-lead route runs through the state screening program, and a documented elevated result also strips the 16-35-7(a) homeowner abatement exemption.

Where violations get reported. Tenants can report a disclosure violation to EPA at epa.gov/lead or to HUD through its lead enforcement pages. The National Lead Information Center, 1-800-424-LEAD, fields questions from both landlords and tenants. Nothing about the process requires the tenant to hire a lawyer first, which is precisely why a clean file matters more than a good argument.

What an inquiry asks for. Signed disclosures for the tenancies in scope, proof of pamphlet delivery, and the records you disclosed or certified you did not have. That is it. An owner who can produce the file usually ends the matter at the document-request stage; an owner who cannot is negotiating over the size of the penalty, not whether there is one.

Federal disclosure is the compliance floor, not the whole picture. West Virginia habitability law applies independently to the underlying condition of the paint, and it is the real state-law duty a landlord owes alongside the federal form.

W. Va. Code 37-6-30 requires the landlord to deliver and maintain the leased premises in a fit and habitable condition, to maintain the property so it meets the requirements of applicable health, safety, fire, and housing codes, to make all repairs necessary to keep the unit fit and habitable, and to keep common areas reasonably safe. Deteriorated lead-based paint — peeling, chipping, chalking, cracking, or damaged — can rise to a habitability defect on its own. Where children under six reside, even modest deterioration of pre-19