9 Lease Clauses That Are Void in Most States (And 3 Rules AI Actually Gets Right)
Nine lease clauses courts refuse to enforce, three federal rules identical in all 50 states, and where AI inverted the rule on eight Texas clauses.
A void clause is a sentence in your lease that a court will not enforce, regardless of whose signature sits under it. That is a different animal from a clause that is merely bad for you, and the difference decides where your negotiating hour goes.
Sorting the two piles is the actual job, and it is also the point where a language model stops being useful without telling you it has stopped. Three lease rules in the United States are federal and identical in all fifty states. Almost everything else is state law, with municipal law layered on top in the cities where rent is highest. On the federal set a model does well, because there is no variance for it to average away. On the state set it produces a clean section number attached to the wrong content, which is worse than no answer at all.
The base rate here is not what most renters assume. Meirav Furth-Matzkin, reading 70 residential leases in Greater Boston for the Journal of Legal Analysis in 2017, found that 69 of them, 99%, carried at least one unenforceable or misleading term. David Hoffman and Anton Strezhnev found the same shape at scale in Leases as Forms, studying 171,306 leases filed in support of more than 200,000 Philadelphia eviction proceedings between 2005 and 2019, and reported that the pro-landlord tilt increased sharply across the period. A bad clause in your lease is the ordinary case rather than bad luck.
And the realistic alternative to reading it yourself is not a lawyer. The Legal Services Corporation's 2022 Justice Gap report found that 92% of the civil legal problems reported by low-income Americans received no legal help or not enough of it, up from 86% in the 2017 edition.
What makes a lease clause void?
A clause is void when a statute says a tenant cannot give up that protection by agreement. The landlord may still print it, you may still sign it, and it still does nothing. Statutes phrase this as waivers being contrary to public policy, which is legal language for a right the legislature took off the negotiating table.
That framing matters because a scary sentence in a lease is evidence of what the landlord wanted, not of what a court would allow. California's Civ. Code § 1953 is the broadest example: it voids any waiver of the deposit rules, the landlord entry rules, the right to assert future claims, statutory notice and hearing rights, procedural litigation rights, and the landlord's duty of care, for every lease executed on or after January 1, 1976.
Nine clauses that are void or rewritten in most states
Each row below is a clause type that appears routinely in residential leases and that statute treats as unenforceable, or converts into something the drafter did not intend. Deposit caps and return deadlines are not here, because the July post already carries the New York, California and Texas deadlines side by side.
| # | Clause as it appears | Typical treatment | Named authority |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Waiver of the implied warranty of habitability | Void as contrary to public policy. In New York the warranty attaches to every residential lease, written or oral | N.Y. Real Prop. Law § 235-b |
| 2 | "Landlord not liable for any injury" | Void. New York bars exempting a landlord from liability for its own or its agents' negligence; California bars waiver of the duty of care | N.Y. Gen. Oblig. Law § 5-321 · Cal. Civ. Code § 1953(a) |
| 3 | Blanket waiver of statutory rights | Void in California for deposits, entry, future claims, notice and hearing rights, litigation procedure and duty of care | Cal. Civ. Code § 1953 |
| 4 | Lockout, utility shutoff, removal of belongings | Illegal nearly everywhere, with statutory damages. NY treble damages; CA $100 per day with a $250 minimum; TX one month rent plus $1,000, and a clause waiving that right is void | RPAPL § 768 · NYC Admin. Code § 26-523 · Cal. Civ. Code § 789.3 · Tex. Prop. Code § 92.008 |
| 5 | Attorney fees for the landlord only | Not struck. Made reciprocal by statute, so the tenant gets the mirror right automatically | N.Y. Real Prop. Law § 234 · Cal. Civ. Code § 1717 |
| 6 | Waiver of jury trial | New York: a tenant cannot waive a jury trial in personal injury or property damage actions | N.Y. Real Prop. Law § 259-c |
| 7 | Late fee above the statutory cap | New York caps the fee at $50 or 5% of monthly rent, whichever is less, and only once rent is more than five days late | N.Y. Real Prop. Law § 238-a |
| 8 | Occupancy restricted to the named tenant | New York: illegal. A tenant may share with one additional occupant plus that occupant's dependent children | N.Y. Real Prop. Law § 235-f |
| 9 | Landlord exempted from the duty to mitigate | New York: the landlord must mitigate after an early move-out, and a clause exempting them is void | N.Y. Real Prop. Law § 227-e |
Three of those behave in ways the word "void" does not describe well.
The attorney-fee clause is the clearest. New York and California do not delete it, they rewrite it. The sentence stays in your lease and now points in both directions, which is a better outcome than deletion and a worse one to explain, because a model summarizing clause by clause will report it as a landlord-favorable term and stop there.
The late fee runs against instinct. Read "$50 or 5% of monthly rent" quickly and your eye supplies the greater-of test that most consumer statutes use. New York takes the lesser, so on a $2,400 apartment the ceiling is $50 rather than $120.
Self-help is the one where a national average fails outright, and Texas is the reason. Tex. Prop. Code § 92.0081 permits a landlord to change the locks on a delinquent tenant under conditions, which is not the answer you get by averaging fifty states that mostly prohibit it. That single exception is the argument of this whole piece in miniature.
New York appears in six of those rows for a reason worth stating plainly. The New York Attorney General publishes the best consolidated tenant guide in the country, so New York statutes are the easiest to cite accurately. That is a sourcing artifact, not evidence that New York leases are worse than yours. Most states have their own version of nearly every row.
Beyond the nine, New York alone voids a pledge of household furniture as security for rent under Real Prop. Law § 231, requires 15 to 30 days notice before an auto-renewal deadline under Gen. Oblig. Law § 5-905, lets a court refuse to enforce any clause found unconscionable when it was made under Real Prop. Law § 235-c, and imposes a plain-language requirement on the lease itself under Gen. Oblig. Law § 5-702.
The three lease rules that are the same in all 50 states
Federal law covers three lease subjects with no state variance, which is precisely why a model handles them well. There is nothing to get wrong about jurisdiction when the rule is the same in Alaska and Alabama.
Lead paint comes with the most machinery. For housing built before 1978, the landlord must give you the EPA pamphlet Protect Your Family From Lead In Your Home, disclose known lead-based paint and hazards, hand over any records and reports in their possession, and include a Lead Warning Statement in the lease document itself, under 42 U.S.C. § 4852d and the implementing rules at 40 CFR Part 745 and 24 CFR Part 35. The exemptions are narrow and worth knowing: zero-bedroom units, leases of 100 days or less with no extension, certified lead-free housing, senior or disability housing with no child under six, and construction after 1977.
Assistance animals run past a no-pets clause. HUD Notice FHEO-2020-01, issued January 28, 2020, treats service animals and support animals as something other than pets, so the pet deposits and pet fees a landlord ordinarily charges do not apply to them, and denying a reasonable accommodation can violate the Fair Housing Act.
Military early termination on qualifying orders comes from the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act at 50 U.S.C. § 3955. I did not open the statute text for this piece, so I am naming the rule and not the notice mechanics. Read those at the source, which is exactly the discipline the rest of this article is arguing for.
I gave a model eight Texas clauses and then graded it
The test was simple enough to repeat. I wrote eight clauses in ordinary Texas lease language, answered them cold as Claude Opus 5 without looking anything up, and only then took every section number to statutes.capitol.texas.gov and Justia to see which ones survived contact with the statute.
The eight cover a fictional $1,600 apartment with a $2,800 deposit: an AS-IS repair shift, a blanket liability release, a lockout-and-utility-shutoff clause, a non-refundable deposit with a 60-day return, a one-way attorney fee term, a jury waiver, a $175 late fee with $25 a day on top, and a single-occupant restriction with a 24-hour guest limit.
(excerpt)
AS-IS, tenant assumes all repairs, waiver of implied warranty. Unenforceable in relevant part. Tex. Prop. Code § 92.052 puts the duty to repair conditions materially affecting the physical health or safety of an ordinary tenant on the landlord, and § 92.006 bars waiver outside the narrow cases the statute spells out, where the agreement must be underlined or in boldface in the lease and made knowingly, voluntarily and for consideration. A blanket AS-IS clause satisfies none of that.
Landlord not liable for any injury from any cause, including its own negligence. Unenforceable as written. Texas applies the express negligence doctrine and a conspicuousness requirement (Dresser Industries v. Page Petroleum, 853 S.W.2d 505 (Tex. 1993)), so a release of a party's own negligence must say so within the four corners of the contract and must be conspicuous. Likely void as to personal injury, uncertain as to property damage.
Lockout, removal of property, utility shutoff, tenant waives claims. Mixed, and Texas differs from most states here. Utility interruption is prohibited by § 92.008 except where it results from bona fide repairs, construction or an emergency. Removing the tenant's property is prohibited. A lockout for nonpayment is permitted under § 92.0081 where the lease authorizes it in underlined or bold print, but the landlord must post notice on the front door and get a key to the tenant on demand at any hour, whether or not the delinquent rent is paid. So "until all sums due are paid" is void, and the waiver sentence is void under § 92.006. Damages: actual damages, one month rent plus $1,000, attorney fees and costs.
Deposit non-refundable on early move-out, returned within 60 days. The 60-day term is void. § 92.103 requires the refund within 30 days of surrender, and § 92.107 conditions the obligation on the tenant giving a written forwarding address. § 92.006 makes the duty to refund non-waivable. Texas sets no statutory cap, so the $2,800 amount is itself lawful. Automatic total forfeiture is unenforceable as a penalty; § 92.104 permits deductions for damages and charges the tenant is legally liable for.
Attorney fees for the landlord only, regardless of outcome. Enforceable, unlike California (Civ. Code § 1717) and New York (Real Prop. Law § 234), which convert one-way fee clauses into reciprocal ones. Texas has no general residential reciprocity statute, though a tenant recovers fees by statute in repair suits and deposit suits.
Jury trial waiver. Enforceable if knowing and voluntary. In re Prudential Insurance Co. of America, 148 S.W.3d 124 (Tex. 2004) upheld contractual jury waivers, with the burden on the party seeking enforcement. Contrast N.Y. Real Prop. Law § 259-c, which voids a tenant's jury waiver in personal injury and property damage actions.
$175 late fee at 5:00 p.m. on the 1st, plus $25 per day, on $1,600 rent. Unenforceable as written, on two grounds. § 92.019 allows a late fee only once rent has remained unpaid one full day after the date it was originally due, so a fee assessed at 5:00 p.m. on the 1st is premature. The statute also presumes a fee reasonable where it does not exceed 12 percent of monthly rent for a dwelling in a structure with four or fewer units, or 10 percent for a structure with more than four. $175 is 10.9 percent of $1,600, clearing the smaller-building threshold and exceeding the larger one, and the $25 per day passes both within days. A waiver of the section is void, and the tenant recovers $100, three times the late fee, and reasonable attorney fees.
Occupancy limited to the named tenant, no guest beyond 24 hours, immediate termination. Partly unenforceable. § 92.010 prohibits a landlord from limiting occupancy to fewer than three adults per bedroom, so a strict single-occupant restriction is unlawful for any unit with a bedroom. Federal fair housing law separately bars occupancy rules that operate to exclude families with children. The 24-hour guest limit is enforceable as a contract term. "Terminate immediately" does not skip procedure, since § 24.005 requires written notice to vacate before an eviction suit is filed.
Void or unenforceable in whole or part: 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8. Enforceable: 5, 6.
The late fee is the instructive miss, because it is half right in the shape that does the most damage. The percentages came back exactly as the statute writes them, 12 percent for a structure with four or fewer dwelling units and 10 percent above that. The trigger did not. Tex. Prop. Code § 92.019 allows the fee only once rent has remained unpaid two full days after the due date, and I wrote one. A renter who took that sentence at face value would concede a fee on day two that the statute does not yet permit, and every surrounding detail would look correct while they did it.
The occupancy clause is the worse error, because the citation was real and the reading was backwards. Section 92.010 caps the maximum number of adults a landlord may allow at three times the number of bedrooms, with exceptions for fair housing obligations and for someone seeking temporary sanctuary from family violence. Neighboring property owners and governmental entities enforce it, at $500 for each violation. It is a ceiling on how many people may live in the unit. I used it as a floor protecting a tenant against a single-occupant restriction, which is not what it says and not what it does. The verdict does not survive its own citation.
Three more verdicts rest on things I never opened. Two are case citations, Dresser Industries and In re Prudential, both quoted from memory with volume and page numbers. One is an absence claim, that Texas has no residential attorney-fee reciprocity statute, and absence is the hardest thing for anyone to verify quickly.
That distribution matches the record rather than departing from it. Damien Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases database logged 1,870 decisions by the third quarter of 2026, and among 5,587 catalogued defects, 319 involve legal norms, meaning statutes and regulations rather than case law. Self-represented litigants have been the majority of those filings every recent quarter, 61.6% in the second quarter of 2026.
Where AI is reliable, and where it inverts the rule
The dividing line is not difficulty, it is whether the correct answer changes at a border. Arithmetic, clause shapes and federal rules travel anywhere, so a model carries them well. Section numbers, effective dates and city ordinances stop at a boundary, and averaging across fifty states produces a jurisdiction that does not exist.
- Totaling mandatory fees scattered across addenda
- Turning "60 days notice" into a calendar date
- Recognizing clause shapes that are commonly void
- The three federally uniform rules
- Naming documents referenced but never attached
- Section numbers, and the conditions inside them
- Effective dates, such as caps that start mid-2024
- City law: stabilization, just-cause, local caps
- Void versus merely unfavorable in your state
- The landlord, who is not in the document
The benchmark numbers point the same way once you read past the headline. Vals AI, testing legal research tools in July 2025 and publishing that October, put ChatGPT at 80% accuracy against a human lawyer baseline of 69%, with dedicated legal tools landing at 78 to 81%. Accuracy then fell roughly 14 points on multi-jurisdictional surveys. A residential lease is a multi-jurisdictional question that arrives looking like a single document, so the 14-point drop is the number that describes your situation and the 80% is not. I read those figures through a secondary roundup rather than the vendor report, which is its own reason to hold them loosely.
My read after grading myself: let the model do the clause shapes and the arithmetic, then treat every section number as a lookup task rather than an answer. One rule I would add from this run. When a model gives you a percentage and a trigger condition in the same sentence, check the trigger first. Mine was right about 12 percent and wrong about the day the clock starts, and the day the clock starts is what decides whether the money is owed.
FAQ
Is a clause in my lease still binding if it's illegal?
No. A void clause is void whether or not you signed it, because the rule that voids it exists to stop landlords from contracting out of tenant protections in the first place. New York says this directly about habitability: the warranty attaches to every residential lease, written or oral, and any agreement waiving or modifying it is void as contrary to public policy under N.Y. Real Prop. Law § 235-b. California draws a wider circle in Civ. Code § 1953, which voids waivers of the deposit rules, the entry rules, the right to assert future claims, statutory notice and hearing rights, procedural litigation rights, and the landlord duty of care, for leases executed on or after January 1, 1976. What follows is a sorting job rather than a fight. Clauses that are enforceable and expensive go in one pile, because that is where a negotiating hour pays. The probably-void ones go in another and become written questions to the leasing office, since a written answer is worth something later and a verbal reassurance is not. The catch is that void depends on your state, and that is the one thing a model cannot settle for you.
Which lease rules are the same in every state?
Three, and all three are federal. For housing built before 1978 the landlord must give you the EPA pamphlet Protect Your Family From Lead In Your Home, disclose known lead-based paint and hazards, hand over any records and reports, and include a Lead Warning Statement in the lease itself, under 42 U.S.C. § 4852d with the rules at 40 CFR Part 745 and 24 CFR Part 35. The exemptions are narrow: zero-bedroom units, leases of 100 days or less with no extension, certified lead-free housing, senior or disability housing with no child under six, and anything built after 1977. Under HUD Notice FHEO-2020-01, issued January 28, 2020, a no-pets clause does not reach service animals or support animals, so the pet deposits and pet fees a landlord ordinarily charges do not apply to them, and refusing a reasonable accommodation can violate the Fair Housing Act. And servicemembers can end a residential lease early on qualifying orders under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act at 50 U.S.C. § 3955. I did not open § 3955 for this piece, so read the notice mechanics at the statute rather than taking them from me or from a model. Everything else in your lease is state law, and often city law on top of that.
Can my landlord change the locks or shut off the utilities if I am behind on rent?
No, and the damages attached to it are why landlords rarely try. New York bars force, threats, lockouts, utility shutoffs and removal of belongings, and a tenant who is locked out may recover treble damages under RPAPL § 768 and NYC Admin. Code § 26-523. California prices it at $100 for each day of violation with a $250 minimum, plus actual damages and attorney fees, under Civ. Code § 789.3. Texas is the exception a nationally averaged answer misses. Tex. Prop. Code § 92.008 forbids interrupting utility service the tenant pays for directly, except where the interruption results from bona fide repairs, construction or an emergency, and a tenant may recover actual damages, one month rent plus $1,000, reasonable attorney fees and court costs. But § 92.0081 does let a landlord change the locks on a delinquent tenant in narrow circumstances, provided written notice goes on the front door naming an on-site location open 24 hours a day where a key can be collected, or a phone number answered 24 hours a day that gets a key delivered within two hours. A lease provision that waives any of this is void under § 92.006. The lockout is conditional, not the free hand the clause language implies.
- 01
Once you sign a lease, every clause in it binds you, including clauses that conflict with state law.
- 02
Texas lets a landlord change the locks on a tenant who is behind on rent, if certain conditions are met.
- 03
The model in this article got every Texas section number right, and only its conclusions were shaky.
Disclaimer
This article is an educational explainer, not legal advice, and it recommends no lease, landlord, service or course of action for your situation. The eight clauses in the test are constructed for the test and describe no real lease. The AI output is a real run on August 12, 2026 on Claude Opus 5, and a different model, prompt or day will produce different output. Texas citations were checked at statutes.capitol.texas.gov and law.justia.com on August 12, 2026; sections 92.103, 92.107 and 92.109 could not be reached at the primary source that day and are reported as unverified above. Landlord-tenant law is state and often city specific and changes frequently. Confirm every provision on your state's official code site and with a lawyer licensed where you live before acting. The longer version of this warning runs at the end of the July walkthrough of an AI lease review.
If the apartment does not exist yet, the checks that catch a rental scam come before any of this. If the lease is already signed and the renewal notice just arrived, negotiating a rent increase with the landlord's own turnover math is the next document to work on, and pricing renters insurance against what the lease requires closes the gap the lease leaves open. For the same grading method run over a different document with its own statutory rights, see finding errors in a hospital bill and disputing errors on a credit report under the FCRA.
Sources
- New York Attorney General, Residential Tenants' Rights Guide (habitability § 235-b, exculpatory clauses § 5-321, attorney fees § 234, jury waiver § 259-c, late fees § 238-a, occupancy § 235-f, duty to mitigate § 227-e, furniture pledge § 231, auto-renewal notice § 5-905, unconscionability § 235-c, plain language § 5-702): https://ag.ny.gov/publications/residential-tenants-rights-guide
- California Civil Code § 1953, waiver of tenant rights void for leases executed on or after January 1, 1976: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CIV§ionNum=1953
- Texas Property Code Chapter 92, read August 12, 2026 (§ 92.006 waiver, § 92.008 utility interruption, § 92.0081 lockout and key-on-demand notice, § 92.019 late fee thresholds and the two-full-days rule, § 92.052 duty to repair): https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PR/htm/PR.92.htm
- Texas Property Code § 92.010, occupancy limits (maximum adults equal to three times the number of bedrooms; $500 per violation): https://law.justia.com/codes/texas/property-code/title-8/chapter-92/subchapter-a/section-92-010/
- Texas Property Code § 24.005, three days written notice to vacate unless the written lease contracts for a different period: https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PR/htm/PR.24.htm
- Texas Property Code § 92.008, self-help utility cutoff and tenant remedies: https://law.justia.com/codes/texas/property-code/title-8/chapter-92/subchapter-a/section-92-008/
- EPA, Real Estate Disclosure for lead-based paint (42 U.S.C. § 4852d; 40 CFR Part 745; 24 CFR Part 35; pamphlet, disclosure, records and Lead Warning Statement requirements and exemptions): https://www.epa.gov/lead/real-estate-disclosure
- HUD Notice FHEO-2020-01, Assessing a Person's Request to Have an Animal as a Reasonable Accommodation, January 28, 2020 (fact sheet): https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/PA/documents/AsstAnimalsGuidFS1-24-20.pdf
- HUD Notice FHEO-2020-01, full notice text: https://www.animallaw.info/sites/default/files/HUD%20FHEO%20Assistance%20Animals%20Notice%202020.pdf
- Meirav Furth-Matzkin, "On the Unexpected Use of Unenforceable Contract Terms: Evidence from the Residential Rental Market," Journal of Legal Analysis 9(1), 2017 (69 of 70 Greater Boston leases, 99%, contained at least one unenforceable or misleading clause): https://academic.oup.com/jla/article/9/1/1/3852726
- David Hoffman and Anton Strezhnev, "Leases as Forms," University of Pennsylvania Carey Law summary (171,306 leases filed in support of more than 200,000 Philadelphia eviction proceedings, 2005-2019, highly likely to contain unenforceable terms, with the pro-landlord tilt increasing over the period): https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/news/11004-prof-david-hoffmans-pathbreaking-research-finds
- Legal Services Corporation, The Justice Gap report, 2022 (92% of civil legal problems of low-income Americans received no or insufficient legal help, up from 86% in 2017): https://justicegap.lsc.gov/
- Damien Charlotin, AI Hallucination Cases database, HEC Paris Smart Law Hub, statistics read August 12, 2026 (1,870 decisions by Q3 2026; 5,587 catalogued defects including 319 legal-norm items; self-represented litigants 61.6% of filings in Q2 2026): https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
- AI Law Librarians, "What the science says about hallucinations in legal research," February 19, 2026, reporting the Vals AI Legal Research Report published October 2025 (tools tested July 2025: ChatGPT 80%, dedicated legal tools 78-81%, human lawyer baseline 69%, roughly a 14-point drop on multi-jurisdictional surveys): https://www.ailawlibrarians.com/2026/02/19/what-the-science-says-about-hallucinations-in-legal-research/
- Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, 50 U.S.C. § 3955, early lease termination on qualifying military orders (statute named, text not opened for this article)