Lease Clauses That Hold Up: And Three That Do Not

Paragraph 19 of the form lease I downloaded in 2016 read, in full: "Tenant agrees to hold Landlord harmless from any and all claims for injury or property damage occurring on the Premises." I signed two tenancies on that document before I read a statute.

That sentence is void in every state whose prohibited-provisions section I have now read. Not weak. Not disfavoured. Void, by name, in a numbered subsection. And in two of those states, keeping it in the document once you know what it is — never enforcing it, never even mentioning it — is itself something the tenant can sue over.

I read Florida, Virginia, Washington, Arizona and California directly at the legislatures' own sites on 19 August 2026. Two houses in the Midwest, no licence, no law degree. The statutes below are doing the work; I am only pointing at them.

The question is not whether the clause is fair

The question is whether a statute already occupies that ground.

Landlord-tenant law is not ordinary contract law. A large group of states run residential tenancies through a chapter descended from the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act — promulgated in 1972, revised by the Uniform Law Commission in 2015 — and those chapters carry a section listing terms a rental agreement simply may not contain. I have not tried to count the adoptions and the count is not the useful part anyway. The useful part is that the sections rhyme. Read one of them carefully and you can find its equivalent in another state in about a minute, because the drafters were working from the same page. States outside that lineage arrive at many of the same results less tidily, through case law and one-off statutes.

The practical consequence: a clause fails not because a judge thinks it harsh, but because the legislature wrote a rule and your paragraph tries to contract around it. That is a much narrower and much more predictable test than "is this enforceable," and it is one you can check yourself in an afternoon.

Failure one: the blanket waiver

"Tenant waives all rights and remedies under the Residential Landlord and Tenant Act."

Every one of the five statutes I read opens with this. Florida § 83.47(1)(a) voids any provision purporting to waive or preclude the rights, remedies or requirements of the part. Virginia § 55.1-1208(A)(1) and Arizona § 33-1315(A)(1) use nearly identical words. Washington RCW 59.18.230(1)(a) calls the waiver "against public policy" and unenforceable.

Washington does allow one exception, and its dimensions are the whole lesson. Under RCW 59.18.360 a landlord and tenant may agree in writing to exempt themselves from six named sections of the chapter — but only where the agreement is not part of a standard form lease, only where the two sides had comparable bargaining power, and only with the written approval of the county prosecutor, the attorney general, or the tenant's own attorney. That is not a paragraph anybody drafts on a Sunday. It is a paragraph you go and get permission for.

The version that actually shows up in owner-drafted leases is subtler and fails the same way. "Tenant accepts the Premises in as-is condition and Landlord shall have no obligation to repair." California Civil Code § 1942.1 kills that one specifically: any waiver of the landlord's habitability duties is void as to any condition making the premises untenantable.

Read the exception in that section closely, because it is the only door left open. Landlord and tenant may agree that the tenant will "improve, repair or maintain all or stipulated portions of the dwelling as part of the consideration for rental." Stipulated portions. As consideration. If you want the tenant handling the lawn and the furnace filters, name those two things, say what they are worth, and stop. A general disclaimer of the repair duty is not a smaller version of that bargain — it is a different thing that the statute rejects.

Failure two: hold harmless

My paragraph 19. The exculpatory clause.

Florida § 83.47(1)(b) voids any provision purporting to limit or preclude liability of either party arising under law. Virginia lists it at (A)(5): the tenant may not be made to agree "to the exculpation or limitation of any liability of the landlord to the tenant arising under law or to indemnify the landlord for that liability or any associated costs." Washington repeats it almost verbatim at (2)(f). Arizona at (A)(3). California § 1953(a)(5) voids any waiver of "his right to have the landlord exercise a duty of care to prevent personal injury or personal property damage where that duty is imposed by law."

Note the indemnity half of the Virginia and Washington language. Owners who learn that hold-harmless fails sometimes try the flip side — the tenant will indemnify the landlord, or will name the landlord as an additional insured to the same effect. Both statutes anticipated it and banned the costs-shifting version in the same breath.

Requiring the tenant to carry renters insurance is a different clause and a legitimate one in most places. It transfers the tenant's own risk to an insurer; it does not transfer your negligence to your tenant. The distinction is worth holding onto, and it is the same distinction that decides what your own landlord policy changes at move-in.

Failure three: the fee-and-judgment pair

"Tenant shall pay all attorney's fees and costs incurred by Landlord in enforcing this Lease."

Virginia (A)(4), Arizona (A)(2) and Washington (2)(e) all list it as a provision a rental agreement may not contain. Arizona shows what the acceptable version looks like: a written agreement may provide that fees be awarded to the prevailing party. Prevailing, not landlord. Change one word and the clause survives.

California does not ban it — it converts it. Civil Code § 1717 says that where a contract provides fees to one specified party, the party who actually prevails gets them "whether he or she is the party specified in the contract or not," and any waiver of that reciprocity is void. So the sentence a landlord wrote as a deterrent is the sentence a tenant's attorney invoices under after winning.

Travelling with it in the same paragraph, usually: the confession of judgment. "Tenant authorizes any attorney to confess judgment against Tenant." Virginia (A)(3), Washington (2)(d). Dead on sight, and unlike the fee clause there is no salvageable version.

What an unenforceable clause costs when nobody enforces it

This is the part that changed how I read my own lease.

Unenforceable does not mean harmless. Washington: if a landlord knowingly uses a rental agreement containing provisions known to be prohibited, the tenant may recover actual damages, statutory damages up to two times the monthly rent, costs and attorney fees. Arizona: actual damages plus not more than two months' periodic rent where the landlord deliberately used the clause. Virginia: if the landlord brings an action to enforce a prohibited provision, the tenant recovers actual damages and reasonable fees. Florida: actual damages to whichever party suffers them.

At $1,300 rent, the Washington exposure is $2,600 plus the tenant's legal bill, arising from a paragraph I copied without reading. Notice which word carries the weight in both statutes — knowingly in Washington, deliberately in Arizona. Not knowing is the defence, and it is the one thing you spend by reading a page like this one. The unenforceable clause is not a dead letter sitting quietly in a drawer. In two of five states it turns into a live cause of action on the day you understand it and leave it in, triggered by drafting rather than by conduct.

One more clause belongs in the same bin: anything purporting to authorise a lockout, a utility shutoff, or the removal of a tenant's belongings. Consent written into a lease does not manufacture that power, and each of the four chapters I read answers it with a remedy rather than a scolding. Florida § 83.67 forbids a landlord to interrupt utility service or to block access "by any means, including, but not limited to, changing the locks or using any bootlock or similar device." Washington RCW 59.18.290(1) makes removal or exclusion without a court order unlawful and returns possession plus actual damages. Arizona § 33-1367 lets an ousted tenant recover two months' periodic rent or twice actual damages, whichever is greater. Virginia § 55.1-1243.1 puts the tenant in front of a general district court judge within five calendar days of filing the petition. Removal happens through a court and a sheriff, or it does not happen.

The clauses that actually survive

Boring, specific, and parallel to the statute rather than against it:

• Rent amount, due date, and method — including a late fee, if it sits inside your state's cap and grace period. Washington bars late fees for rent paid within five days of the due date, in that same § 59.18.230 list, at (2)(i).
• Entry notice that restates your state's notice period rather than shortening it.
• A renters insurance requirement with a stated minimum liability limit, a no-smoking clause, and a pet policy that keeps assistance animals out of the pet terms altogether.
• Deposit terms that match your state's cap and holding rules rather than inventing their own. A clause declaring the deposit "non-refundable" or "automatically forfeited on early termination" runs straight into the cap, account and interest rules your state already sets, and forfeiture-by-clause is the fastest way to convert an ordinary move-out into a statutory penalty case.

Three more live in my lease on one line each and have never needed more: joint and several liability for co-tenants; written consent for alterations, subletting and additional occupants; and severability, which is the paragraph that limits the damage on the day one of the others turns out to be one of the three failures above.

Same principle underneath all of it. The clause tells the tenant what to do, or it restates a rule the legislature already wrote. It does not try to delete one.

Sweeping damage language fails on the same logic. "Tenant is responsible for all damage to the Premises during the term" reads well and collects nothing, because the statutes and case law that separate ordinary wear from chargeable damage are not yours to overwrite by contract.

Reading your own state in about ten minutes

Open your legislature's site — the .gov one, not a summary — and search your residential landlord-tenant chapter for "prohibited provisions" or "waiver". In the five states above the section is titled almost exactly that, and it is short enough to read in one sitting. Print it. Then read your lease with it beside you, paragraph by paragraph, and mark every sentence that removes something rather than adds something.

If your state has no such section, you are in case-law territory and a summary will not be enough. Your state court system's self-help centre and a local landlord-tenant attorney are the right next stop, and one hour of a lawyer's time against a lease you will reuse for a decade is cheap.

What I cut from my own document was paragraph 19 and the fee sentence. What surprised me was how little the lease lost. The hold-harmless clause had never done anything except sit there generating exposure, and once it was gone the lease said the same things it had always actually meant. Most of what makes a lease work is arithmetic and dates. The clauses that fail are the ones written out of a wish to be immune, and immunity is precisely what a legislature spends a whole section refusing to sell.

Warren Ashby is not an attorney. This describes how these statutes are written and where to find yours; it is not legal advice about your lease.