Landlord Required Disclosures: Lead Paint, Mold, State

The county assessor's card for a rental says 1962. The lease packet the landlord handed over has the application, the lease, the condition checklist, the renters insurance clause, and a page of house rules about the garbage cans. It does not have the Lead Warning Statement. It does not have the pamphlet. And the file has no signed page saying either was ever delivered.

That packet is a federal violation. Not a technicality that a judge might frown at. A violation with a statutory ceiling of $22,263 per instance in the current EPA penalty table, treble damages to the tenant on top, and nothing in the lease that can cure it after the fact. And it happens because nobody looked at the build year.

Everything below was read on 30 August 2026: the federal rule from the eCFR versioner (title 40 issued through 27 August 2026), the statute from the U.S. Code, and each state section from its legislature's site where it would serve one. I own two Midwest houses, hold no licence and practise no law.

The federal floor: pre-1978 housing

The rule comes from the Residential Lead-Based Paint Hazard Reduction Act of 1992, 42 U.S.C. § 4852d, with twin regulations at 24 CFR Part 35 subpart A (HUD) and 40 CFR Part 745 subpart F (EPA).

Before the tenant "is obligated under any contract" to lease target housing, 40 CFR 745.107(a) requires four things of the lessor:

1. An EPA-approved lead hazard pamphlet. The regulation names it: Protect Your Family From Lead in Your Home, EPA #747-K-94-001. The current edition on EPA's site is dated January 2026 and is posted in English, Spanish, Chinese, French and Polish.
2. Disclosure of any known lead-based paint or lead-based paint hazards, with what you know about location and the condition of painted surfaces.
3. The same disclosure to any agent you use.
4. Copies of any records or reports available to you on lead paint in the dwelling or common areas.

"Available" means in your possession or reasonably obtainable (§ 745.103), and § 745.107(a) says in terms that nothing in it implies "a positive obligation on the seller or lessor to conduct any evaluation." You are not being asked to test. You are being asked to hand over what you have, and to say in writing when that is nothing.

Then comes the paper. § 745.113(b) requires, as an attachment or inside the lease, in the language of the lease:

• A Lead Warning Statement in these exact words: "Housing built before 1978 may contain lead-based paint. Lead from paint, paint chips, and dust can pose health hazards if not managed properly. Lead exposure is especially harmful to young children and pregnant women. Before renting pre-1978 housing, lessors must disclose the presence of known lead-based paint and/or lead-based paint hazards in the dwelling. Lessees must also receive a federally approved pamphlet on lead poisoning prevention."
• Your statement of known lead paint or hazards, or of no knowledge of any; a list of records handed over, or a statement that none exist.
• The tenant's statement that they received the pamphlet and the information, and dated signatures of lessor, tenant, and any agent.

EPA publishes a sample lessor's disclosure form that covers all of it on one page. Use it. Do not paraphrase the warning statement; the regulation specifies the language, and a reworded version is not compliance.

Keep the signed copy for three years from the start of the lease. That is the retention period in § 745.113(c), and it is the document you produce when a tenant with a two-year-old and a blood test result asks what you told them.

Who is exempt, and who only thinks they are

24 CFR 35.82 and its EPA twin carve out four lease situations:

The renewal exemption presumes the first disclosure was complete. If the file from year one has no signed page, year three's renewal is not a renewal of anything, and every lease signed on that house is a separate instance.

Here is the check that takes four minutes and prevents the whole problem. Pull the assessor's record for the parcel and read the year built. Then read it again for any detached structure a tenant will use, because a 1955 garage apartment behind a 1994 house is target housing. If the number is 1977 or earlier, the lead attachment goes in the packet permanently, on every new tenancy, and the pamphlet goes with it. If it is 1978 or later, write the year and its source inside the file folder so nobody has to guess again.

What a missed disclosure costs

The enforcement section, 40 CFR 745.118, stacks three consequences that do not offset one another.

Treble damages to the tenant. A person who knowingly violates the subpart is "jointly and severally liable to the purchaser or lessee in an amount equal to 3 times the amount of damages incurred," with court costs, attorney fees and expert witness fees to a prevailing tenant. The damages in a lead case are medical and developmental; read your own policy before assuming it covers three times them.

HUD civil penalties. Knowing failure is subject to penalties under 42 U.S.C. 3545 and 24 CFR part 30.

EPA civil penalties under TSCA. The regulation text still says $11,000, and then tells you in the next sentence that the figure "may not reflect recent inflation adjustments" and points to 40 CFR 19.4. That table, read 30 August 2026, lists 42 U.S.C. 4852d(b)(5) at $22,263 per violation for penalties assessed on or after 8 January 2025, up from $21,699 in the prior period and from the $10,000 Congress wrote in 1992. The last amendment cited under that section is 90 FR 1377 of 8 January 2025, and a search of the Federal Register through 30 August 2026 turned up no 2026 EPA penalty adjustment rule, so $22,263 was still the operative figure on that date. Check the current table before quoting it to anyone, because the number usually moves in January.

"Knowingly" is the word in every one of those. A landlord who never read the year built is not the sympathetic figure the word suggests. Ignorance of the house's age is not a defence, and EPA enforcement in this area has reached owners with a handful of units.

Three state lists, read from the source

The federal rule is the floor. Every state adds to it, and the additions do not resemble each other. Three states, chosen for the range.

California

The longest list I have read, scattered across two codes.

• Bed bugs. Civil Code § 1954.603: before creating any new tenancy, a written notice in at least 10-point type covering identification, biology, the importance of prompt written reporting, and your procedure for receiving reports. The statute supplies the paragraph of standard text; copy it rather than writing your own.
• Megan's Law. Civil Code § 2079.10a requires every lease of a single-family residence to carry, in at least 8-point type, the notice beginning "Pursuant to Section 290.46 of the Penal Code, information about specified registered sex offenders is made available to the public via an Internet Web site maintained by the Department of Justice at www.meganslaw.ca.gov." The section names single-family property and buildings of more than four units, which leaves a duplex outside the literal text. Put it in anyway. It costs one line.
• Smoking. Civil Code § 1947.5: if you prohibit smoking anywhere on the property, the lease must specify the areas where it is prohibited.
• Pest control contract. Civil Code § 1940.8: if you hold a periodic pest control contract, each new tenant gets a copy of the operator's notice.
• Mold. Health and Safety Code § 26147 requires written disclosure to a prospective tenant where you know or have reasonable cause to believe mold is present above permissible exposure limits set under that chapter, and it says outright that no testing is required. Its operation depends on standards adopted by the state health department, and whether those exist in the form the section contemplates is a question for a California attorney. The safe reading is the plain one: known mold gets written disclosure and a repair.

Five items before the federal lead packet, and San Francisco, Los Angeles and Oakland add their own.

Texas

Texas keeps most of it in Property Code chapter 92.

• Flood. § 92.0135, in force since 1 January 2022, requires a separate written notice at or before execution of the lease stating whether the landlord is or is not aware that the dwelling is in a 100-year floodplain, with a pointer to FEMA's flood map, and a second statement on whether the landlord is aware the dwelling has flooded at least once in the last five years. The remedy is unusual: a tenant who suffers a flood loss of at least half the value of their personal property, where the notice was not given, may terminate by written notice within 30 days of the loss, and the landlord refunds advance rent within 30 days.
• Ownership and management. § 92.201: the name and a street or P.O. box address of the record title holder, and the name and street address of any off-site management company. Put it in the lease; otherwise you owe it in writing within seven days of a tenant's request.

The Legislature's own site is a script-rendered application that gave me no text, so the links above go to a mirror; confirm at statutes.capitol.texas.gov before relying on a quotation.

New York

New York puts its disclosures inside the lease instrument.

• Sprinklers. Real Property Law § 231-a: every residential lease carries "conspicuous notice in bold face type as to the existence or non-existence of a maintained and operative sprinkler system," and where one exists, the date of its last maintenance and inspection.
• Flood. Real Property Law § 231-b, added in 2023, requires disclosure of whether the premises are in a FEMA-designated floodplain, whether in a Special Flood Hazard Area or a Moderate Risk Area on the current map, and any prior flood damage the landlord knows or reasonably should know about. The lease must also carry a fixed paragraph beginning "Flood insurance is available to renters through the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA's) National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)..." and ending with an encouragement to examine the tenant's own policy. It is the tenant-side twin of the flood gap in a renters insurance clause.
• Bed bugs, New York City only. Administrative Code § 27-2018.1 requires the owner to give every tenant signing a vacancy lease the one-year bedbug history for the unit and the building, on the Bedbug Disclosure Form published by New York State Homes and Community Renewal, and § 27-2018.2 requires an annual filing with HPD between 1 December and 31 December covering the previous November through October. HPD's bedbug page links both.

What the three have in common: almost nothing. Flood is the only item on two lists, and each state wrote its own paragraph. There is no national disclosure form, and any packet sold as one has to be checked line by line against your own chapter.

Building your own list

Open your state's residential landlord-tenant chapter and search it for disclose, notice, shall provide and lease shall contain. The disclosure sections are the ones with a fixed form of words, a type-size rule, or a trigger such as "prior to entering into." For each hit write down what triggers it, when it is due, and whether it goes inside the lease or on a separate sheet.

Then do the same for your city. Registration ordinances often carry their own notices, and the same code that tells you whether your city requires rental registration is usually where they live.

Two habits keep the list from rotting. Date each section you read, in the file, so a year from now you know whether it has been amended. And keep disclosures on separately signed pages where the statute allows, so adding one does not mean redrafting the lease. A disclosure buried in boilerplate is also the one a court is least likely to find conspicuous, a cousin of the failure that makes some lease clauses fall on sight.

What goes in the file, and for how long

The file is the compliance. A pamphlet handed over and never acknowledged is a pamphlet you cannot prove you handed over, and the whole regulation is built around that signature. Ten state sections, one statute, two regulations and a penalty table, each read on 30 August 2026 and linked above; where your house sits against them is the part only you can check.