Landlord Atlas

What must an Alabama landlord disclose to a tenant, and what must the lease say?

Verified September 13, 2026 All Alabama topics →

An Alabama landlord must tell a tenant one thing at or before the tenancy begins: in writing, the name and business address of whoever manages the premises and of an owner or a person authorized to accept service and notices for the owner.

Cited to Ala. Code § 35-9A-121 (application; exclusive remedy; local preemption) and 19 more cited sources · Verified September 13, 2026

No telephone number, no posting, no form, no signature, and the only consequence of silence is that whoever signed the lease for the landlord becomes the landlord's agent for service and for performing the landlord's obligations out of the rent. Nothing else need be disclosed: no hazard, no flood risk, no fees or utilities, no move-in condition report, no copy of the signed lease and no tenant-rights document. Alabama's one prescribed lease text is environmental, and it binds only an owner whose property sits on a state cleanup inventory and was cleaned to standards less stringent than unrestricted residential use. Four lease clauses are prohibited, including any clause making the tenant pay the landlord's attorney fees or cost of collection, and the tenant recovers money for one only where the landlord knew the clause was prohibited and tried to enforce it. Cities and counties may not add rules of their own: the act preempts local ordinances about residential landlords, leaving only building and health codes that apply equally to owner-occupied homes.

Alabama lease disclosures at a glance

Which law governs Chapter 35-9A of the Code of Alabama, the Alabama Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act of 2006, governs residential tenancies and says so in the strongest terms available: it applies to and is the exclusive remedy to regulate and determine rights, obligations and remedies under a rental agreement, wherever made, for a dwelling unit located in the state. Alabama keeps the older general landlord-and-tenant chapter, chapter 35-9, alive for agricultural liens, crop liens and the like, but for a dwelling unit the residential act controls. Everything on this page comes from chapter 35-9A unless another chapter is named. Two provisions outside it carry real weight here: the statute of frauds in Title 8 and the recording rule for long leases in Title 35, and the environmental notice that a lease must contain where the property sits on one of the state's cleanup inventories.
Who is covered The residential act reaches every dwelling unit in the state and excludes eight arrangements, each only where it was not created to avoid the act: residence at an institution incidental to detention or to medical, geriatric, educational, counseling or similar service; occupancy under a contract of sale by the purchaser or a successor; occupancy in a fraternal or social organization's housing; transient occupancy in a hotel, motel or lodgings; occupancy by an employee conditional on employment in and about the premises; occupancy by an owner of a condominium unit or a cooperative proprietary lessee; premises rented primarily for agricultural purposes; and continued occupancy by the seller or a member of the seller's family for not more than thirty-six months after a sale. The one prescribed lease text on this page carries its own threshold: it binds only the owner of a property listed on one of the state's cleanup inventories and cleaned to standards less stringent than those required for unrestricted residential use.
Written lease, copy and signature rules

No statute requires a residential lease to be in writing beyond the statute of frauds, so an oral tenancy is lawful. No statute requires the landlord to give the tenant a copy of the lease.

No Alabama statute requires a residential rental agreement to be in writing, and none requires the landlord to give the tenant a copy of a signed one. The act's lease-content section is permissive: the parties may include terms not prohibited by the chapter or other law, including rent, the term and provisions governing their rights and obligations, and where the agreement fixes no definite term the tenancy is week to week for a tenant who pays weekly rent and month to month in every other case. Signing and delivery matter for a different reason: a landlord who does not sign and deliver a written agreement the tenant has signed and delivered is bound by it once rent is accepted without reservation, the same rule runs the other way against a tenant who takes possession and pays rent, and an agreement given effect that way is good for only one year however long its stated term. A lease for longer than a year must be written and signed to be enforceable, no leasehold may run longer than ninety-nine years, and a lease for more than twenty years is void for the excess unless it, or a memorandum of it, is acknowledged as a conveyance would be and recorded within a year of execution in the probate office of the county where the property lies. Alabama has no translation duty, no plain-language act and no type-size or placement rule for leases.

Statute of frauds: Every contract for the sale of lands, tenements or hereditaments, or of any interest in them, except a lease for a term not longer than one year, is void unless the agreement, or some note or memorandum of it expressing the consideration, is in writing and subscribed by the party to be charged, or unless the purchase money or part of it is paid and the purchaser is put in possession by the seller (section 8-9-2, paragraph 5). Alabama's word is void, not merely unenforceable, and the threshold is a term longer than one year.

Electronic leases and signatures: Alabama's electronic-transactions chapter makes an electronic record satisfy a law requiring a writing and an electronic signature satisfy a law requiring a signature, so a residential lease may be signed and delivered electronically. Two limits matter. The chapter does not apply to a notice of default, acceleration, repossession, foreclosure or eviction, or of the right to cure, under a rental agreement for an individual's primary residence, so those notices fall outside it. And an electronic record satisfies a requirement to deliver a record in writing only if it can be retained by the recipient at the time of receipt; a record the sender inhibits from being printed or stored is not enforceable against the recipient.
Owner and agent identity

Yes — a statute requires the landlord to disclose the owner's or managing agent's identity to the tenant, in the lease or in a separate writing.

A landlord, or anyone authorized to enter into a rental agreement on the landlord's behalf, must disclose to the tenant in writing at or before the tenancy begins the name and business address of the person authorized to manage the premises, and the name and business address of an owner of the premises or of a person authorized to act for the owner for service of process and for receiving and receipting for notices and demands. The statute asks for a business address rather than a home one, and it asks for no telephone number and no e-mail. It prescribes no medium beyond writing, so the disclosure may sit in the lease or in a separate writing, and Alabama offers no posting alternative. The information must be kept current, and the duty reaches and is enforceable against any successor landlord, owner or manager. There is no unit count, no owner-occupied carve-out and no other threshold. The consequence is agency by operation of law: a person who fails to comply becomes the agent of each landlord for service of process and for receiving and receipting for notices and demands, and for performing the landlord's obligations under the act and the rental agreement, spending or making available for that purpose all rent collected from the premises. The section states no damages figure, no fee award and no bar on bringing an eviction. Alabama has no statewide landlord or rental registration, and a city or county may not create one, because the act preempts local ordinances about residential landlords.
Required statements and lease text

No general statement or document is prescribed, but the statutes or rules fix some of what the lease must say, listed here.

Alabama prescribes no tenant-rights statement, no summary of the residential act, no agency form, no model lease and no general lease text. Nothing must be handed over or attached at signing, and no agency is directed to publish anything of the kind. The one place where a reader might expect a document is the real-estate brokerage disclosure regime, and Alabama expressly puts rentals outside it: brokerage service is defined to exclude rental and property management services, and the section requiring a licensee to give a consumer a written disclosure form says in terms that all rental or property management services are excluded, a carve-out the two acts that rewrote the regime in 2025 left untouched. So a licensee who leases an Alabama dwelling owes the tenant no relationship-disclosure document. The only words Alabama requires a lease to contain are the contaminated-site notice described in the lease-contents list and in the hazard table, which is a property-specific environmental notice rather than a general rights statement. House rules are a notice condition rather than lease content: a rule is enforceable only if the tenant had notice of it when the agreement was made or when it was adopted, a later rule that works a substantial modification of the tenant's use is invalid without the tenant's written consent, and where a rule and the lease conflict the lease prevails.

Lease contents the statutes or rules address, each in the circumstance it names:

• Where the property is listed on the state's Voluntary Cleanup Properties Inventory, or on the Cleanup Properties Inventory kept under the drycleaning-response program, and was cleaned to standards less stringent than those required for unrestricted residential use, the lease or rental agreement must contain the notice the statute and the rule set out word for word, saying that the property is on the inventory, that it was cleaned to less stringent standards because of substances regulated under state law, that certain uses may require additional cleanup, and that further information is available from the property owner or the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (section 22-30E-11, subsection b; Alabama Administrative Code rule 335-16-7-.03, subsection 3, paragraph a).
Move-in condition report

No.

No Alabama statute or rule requires a move-in condition report, an inventory, a checklist or a walk-through, and none exists anywhere in the residential act's forty-eight sections. Nor does the deposit section make one matter: a landlord may apply the deposit to accrued rent and to damage from the tenant's breach of the tenant's own maintenance duties, all as itemized in a written notice delivered to the tenant with the amount due within sixty days after the tenancy ends and possession is delivered, and a landlord who misses that sixty-day deadline owes the tenant double the original deposit. Nothing in that section conditions withholding on a statement of the unit's condition at move-in, so the widely repeated claim that Alabama requires a move-in checklist has no basis. A landlord who wants evidence of the unit's condition keeps its own record.
Hazard disclosures

One in-force state hazard disclosure: contaminated-site notice in the lease (at signing). No state duty exists for lead, mold, bed bugs, radon, methamphetamine, or asbestos.

Every state duty and every stated absence, hazard by hazard:

Lead (state add-on to the federal rule) — no state duty. Alabama adds nothing to the federal lead-paint rule for landlords. Its lead law is a certification and abatement program: the state act covers definitions, scope, investigations and certification, and the health department rules cover accreditation, training, hazard-reduction standards and renovation-contractor certification. The one occupant-facing duty in that family binds the firm performing a renovation, not the landlord: the firm must give the owner the pamphlet no more than sixty days before the work starts and obtain a written acknowledgment or a certificate of mailing, and where the owner does not occupy the unit the firm must give an adult occupant the pamphlet on the same terms. That is the state version of the federal renovation program, not a landlord duty at signing.

Mold — no state duty. No Alabama statute or rule requires a mold disclosure to a tenant, and the state has no indoor-mold standard for rented housing. The handful of statutory mentions are insurance, licensing and tax provisions, and the only one about buildings is a construction rule requiring municipalities to allow temporary power or gas during construction so that mold does not build up. Every mention in the rules is about molding machines and patterns, dairy and milk standards, package labeling or tire manufacture.

Bed bugs — no state duty. Alabama has no bed-bug statute and no bed-bug disclosure. The only rule in the state that mentions bed bugs is a public-health sanitation rule making premises infested with rodents or insects, bed bugs among them, subject to a control requirement. Nothing must be said to a tenant at signing.

Radon — no state duty. Alabama has no radon statute at all: the word returns nothing in the whole Code. The rules that mention it are radiation-protection licensing rules, drinking-water radionuclide standards and an air-pollutant list, none of which reaches a landlord or a lease.

Methamphetamine — no state duty. Alabama requires no disclosure that a property was used to manufacture methamphetamine, and it does not bar renting one out either. Its methamphetamine provisions are criminal: trafficking, distribution, precursor sales, drug-court diversion and related rules, none of them about property, transfer or tenancy. The state has no decontamination-standards regime and no clean-up certificate, so there is nothing a landlord must obtain and nothing a landlord must say.

Asbestos — no state duty. No Alabama statute or rule requires an asbestos disclosure to a tenant. The statutes on the subject are an accreditation and certification program, a limitations provision, a child-labor prohibition and the asbestos-litigation trust rules, which place a disclosure duty on a claimant rather than on a landlord. The rules are accreditation, abatement and air-emission rules.

Contaminated-site notice in the lease (cleanup inventories) — in force — a state duty, at signing, in the lease itself (a statute and an administrative rule). Alabama has one lease disclosure and it is environmental. Since August 21, 2001, the owner of a property listed on the state's Voluntary Cleanup Properties Inventory that was cleaned to standards less stringent than those required for unrestricted residential use must put a set notice into any deed, mortgage, deed to secure debt, lease, rental agreement or other instrument the owner gives that creates an interest in the property. The words are fixed by the statute: that the property has been listed on the inventory and cleaned up to less stringent standards because of substances regulated under state law, that certain uses may require additional cleanup, that further information is available from the property owner or the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, and that the notice is given in compliance with the Alabama Land Recycling and Economic Redevelopment Act. A rule of the Department of Environmental Management carries the same duty, in nearly identical words, for a property on the Cleanup Properties Inventory kept under the drycleaning-response program. There is no agency form and no signature requirement, the notice goes in the lease itself, and neither the statute nor the rule states any penalty for leaving it out. Threshold: Only a property listed on the state's Voluntary Cleanup Properties Inventory, or on the Cleanup Properties Inventory kept under the drycleaning-response program, and designated as having been cleaned up to standards less stringent than those required for unrestricted residential use. The notice comes out once the Department of Environmental Management determines in writing that the property has been cleaned to unrestricted-residential standards. The section states no penalty for a failure.
Flood disclosure

No.

Alabama requires no flood disclosure to a tenant, and none to a buyer either, because the state has no residential property-condition disclosure statute at all. A search of the whole Code for a property condition disclosure returns nothing, and the sections that use the phrase disclosure statement are about electric cooperatives, competitive bidding, structured-settlement transfers, improvement districts and state specifications, not about residential transfers. The word flood appears widely in Alabama law, in flood-control authorities, drainage and water-management districts, county land-use powers, insurance regulation, salvage vehicles and disaster provisions, but the only flood provision touching a real-property transaction requires a condominium plat to show flood-zone information. Nothing in the residential act mentions flooding. One new act to watch is out of scope: from January 1, 2027 a camp operator may not build or expand a cabin in a floodplain, a children's-camp licensing rule that reaches transient camp lodging rather than a residential tenancy.
Disclosures about the property's situation No statutory disclosure of this kind
What need not be disclosed None — no statute says a fact about the property need not or may not be disclosed in a rental, or bars a claim over its non-disclosure.
Utility, fee and payment disclosures No statutory disclosure of this kind
Lease clauses that are void or prohibited

Yes — the statute lists the lease provisions that are void or prohibited.

Alabama's roster is short, sits in one section and is narrower than the uniform act it came from. Four provisions are prohibited: a waiver of rights or remedies, a confession of judgment, a clause making the tenant pay the landlord's attorney fees or cost of collection, and an exculpation, limitation of the landlord's liability or indemnity for it. The waiver item is the one to read closely, because Alabama did not adopt the uniform act's general bar on waiving any right under the act: it names only the landlord's maintenance duty, the tenant's remedies for the landlord's noncompliance, the section on wrongful failure to supply heat, water, hot water or essential services, the security-deposit requirements and the law of unlawful detainer. Anything else in the act can be bargained away. The roster reaches the tenant's promises only, not either party's clauses. Behind it sits a general unconscionability power: a court that finds a rental agreement or any provision of it, or a settlement waiving a claim under the act, was unconscionable when made may refuse to enforce it, enforce the rest without it, or limit its application, after giving both sides the chance to present evidence about its setting, purpose and effect. The courts have construed the roster both ways: a jury-waiver clause is outside the exculpation item, while the exculpation item itself is read broadly to make unenforceable any provision by which a tenant agrees to the exculpation or limitation of the landlord's liability arising under law.

The sanction needs deliberate use and an attempt to enforce the clause. It reaches clauses against the tenant.

Sanction as the statute states it: A prohibited provision included in a rental agreement is unenforceable, and by itself that is the whole consequence. Money follows only on two elements together: if a landlord seeks to enforce a provision in a rental agreement containing provisions known by the landlord to be prohibited, the tenant may recover, in addition to actual damages, an amount up to one month's periodic rent and reasonable attorney fees. Knowledge alone is not enough, and neither is including the clause; the landlord must try to enforce it. There is no cure window and no multiple beyond the single month.

The listed provisions:

• A provision that the tenant agrees to waive or forego rights or remedies established under the landlord's duty to maintain the premises, under the tenant's remedies for the landlord's noncompliance, or under the wrongful failure to make available heat, water, hot water or essential services, or the security-deposit requirements of the act, or the law of unlawful detainer (section 35-9A-163, subsection a, paragraph 1).

• A provision authorizing any person to confess judgment on a claim arising out of the rental agreement (paragraph 2).

• A provision that the tenant agrees to pay the landlord's attorney fees or cost of collection (paragraph 3).

• A provision agreeing to the exculpation or limitation of any liability of the landlord arising under law, or to indemnify the landlord for that liability or the costs connected with it (paragraph 4).

Expressly permitted: A jury-waiver clause in a residential lease is not within the exculpation item, the Court of Civil Appeals having held that whether a case is tried to a jury or to a judge does not affect the legal obligations on which a landlord's liability would rest, and that the legislature could have barred such a clause plainly had it meant to.
Attorney-fee clauses

A lease clause making a party pay the landlord's attorney fees is void.

A clause in which the tenant agrees to pay the landlord's attorney fees, or the landlord's cost of collection, is a prohibited provision and is unenforceable. The collection-costs limb is the one most Alabama leases actually contain, and it falls with the rest. Nothing in Alabama law converts such a clause into a reciprocal promise, and the state has no general prevailing-party fee statute. What it has instead is fees attached remedy by remedy, running in both directions depending on which remedy is invoked. Four run to the tenant: on a prohibited-clause claim where the landlord sought to enforce a clause it knew was prohibited; on the landlord's noncompliance with the agreement or with the duty to maintain the premises; on an unlawful ouster, alongside the greater of three months' periodic rent or actual damages; and, for whichever party is aggrieved, on a failure to deliver possession that was not in good faith. Four run to the landlord: where a tenant's defense or counterclaim is without merit and not raised in good faith; on the tenant's noncompliance with the agreement or with the tenant's own maintenance duties; on termination, alongside possession, rent and actual damages; and on a willful holdover not in good faith.
When, how, and what happens on a failure Alabama has one landlord disclosure duty with real timing, and it is the identity disclosure: in writing, at or before the tenancy begins, kept current, binding successors, with no prescribed medium, no posting alternative and no acknowledgment. The one prescribed lease text, the contaminated-site notice, goes into the instrument itself whenever an instrument creating an interest in a listed property is given, so it recurs with each new lease and drops out once the Department of Environmental Management makes its written unrestricted-use determination. House rules must be noticed at signing or on adoption, and a later rule that substantially changes the tenant's use needs the tenant's written consent. Nothing else on this page is owed at any time, and no duty recurs annually. The remedies are lopsided. Failing to disclose identity makes the person who signed for the landlord the landlord's agent for service, for notices and for performing the landlord's obligations out of the rent collected, but the section states no damages, no fee award and no bar on an eviction. The contaminated-site notice and the house-rules condition state no penalty at all; the notice's only sanction is that the rest of environmental law continues to apply, and a rule that was not noticed is simply unenforceable, with the lease prevailing over any rule that conflicts with it. A prohibited lease clause is unenforceable, and costs the landlord money only where it both knew the clause was prohibited and tried to enforce it. For notices under the act generally, the chapter supplies its own receipt rules, and they expressly do not apply to the notice required to terminate a tenancy or to evict a tenant. The act says nothing about e-mail or electronic delivery, and the state's electronic-transactions chapter excludes default, eviction and right-to-cure notices on a primary residence.
Can cities add their own rules Alabama preempts local landlord-tenant regulation by name. No resolution or ordinance relative to residential landlords, rental housing codes, or the rights and obligations governing residential landlord and tenant relationships may be enacted or enforced by any county or municipality, and any such ordinance enacted before or after January 1, 2007 is superseded by the residential act. That sentence was added in 2009, three years after the act itself. One carve-out sits in the same section: a county or municipality may enact and enforce building codes, health codes and other general laws that affect rental property, provided those codes equally affect similarly situated owner-occupied residential property. The equal-effect proviso is the operative test, and it has been litigated: a city ordinance requiring the owner of rental residential property to obtain a certificate of occupancy before a tenant could occupy, to renew it every twelve months or on each vacancy, and to pay a fifty-dollar inspection fee, was enjoined in 2022 and repealed by the city in 2023, and the Supreme Court's 2025 decision in the case describes the preemption and its proviso while deciding only that the council members are legislatively immune. Two new chapters, both effective October 1, 2026, authorize narrow local action without touching a tenancy: a Class 1 municipality may adopt a vacant-property registration and maintenance program with a citywide database and a program administrator, and a Class 1 municipality may create community land trusts by ordinance, with the contents of a trust's ground lease set by statute and a clause providing that the chapter controls where it is inconsistent with other law. No Alabama city carries a lease-packet or tenant-disclosure requirement on this page.
How state law refers to the federal rules State law adds nothing to, and refers to nothing in, the federal rules, which are listed further down this page
Changes already signed into law

Act 2026-511 (House Bill 315), adding chapter 11-67C to the Code of Alabama: From October 1, 2026 a Class 1 municipality that adopts an ordinance for the purpose may run a vacant-property registration and maintenance program reaching residential or commercial buildings or both, excluding property owned by a government or a public corporation, with a citywide registration database and a designated program administrator. It is the first express statutory authorization of a local property-registration ordinance in Alabama. Because it reaches vacant property rather than a tenancy, it does not disturb the preemption of local landlord-tenant ordinances, but it becomes a third carve-out from it on that date. Text: Ala. Code §§ 11-67C-1 to 11-67C-7.

Act 2026-545 (House Bill 404), the Alabama Community Land Trust Act of 2026, adding chapter 24-1B: From October 1, 2026 a Class 1 municipality may create community land trusts by ordinance, and the statute prescribes what a trust's ground lease must contain: its term and renewability, the resale-restricted formula, the trust's and the municipality's preemptive purchase options, the grounds for cancellation and the occupancy requirements. The chapter also provides that it controls where it is inconsistent with another law. These are ground-lease terms between a land trust and a qualified lessee rather than residential lease disclosures, but the override clause and the new local power both bear on the state's preemption of local landlord-tenant ordinances. Text: Ala. Code §§ 24-1B-1 to 24-1B-12.
Leading court decisions

Ex parte Bobby Scott, Roger A. Barlow, and D.M. Collins (In re: Atlas Rental Property, LLC v. City of Center Point), No. SC-2024-0473 (Supreme Court of Alabama; 2025; residential setting; bears on local authority to add rules): Granting the city officials' petition on legislative immunity, the court set out the residential act's preemption clause and its proviso: the act generally prohibits counties and municipalities from enacting ordinances relative to residential landlords, rental housing codes, or the rights and obligations governing residential landlord and tenant relationships, but permits building codes, health codes and other general laws affecting rental property provided such codes equally affect similarly situated owner-occupied residential property. The ordinance at issue required an owner of rental residential property to obtain a certificate of occupancy before a tenant could occupy, to renew it every twelve months or on each vacancy, and to pay a fifty-dollar inspection fee; it was preliminarily enjoined in 2022 and repealed by the city in 2023. The immunity holding is the decision; the account of the preemption is made in the course of it.

Coble v. Haden Development, L.L.C., 72 So. 3d 656 (Alabama Court of Civil Appeals; 2011; residential setting; bears on void or prohibited lease clauses): A jury-waiver provision in a residential lease is not a limitation of liability within the prohibited-provisions section, because whether the action is tried to a jury or to a judge does not affect the legal obligations on which the landlord's liability would be based, and the legislature could have prohibited such a provision plainly had it intended to. The court noted that the exculpation item is identical to the corresponding provision of the uniform act and that no Alabama decision had addressed the question before. This is the only decision construing Alabama's prohibited-provisions list, and it construes it narrowly.

Robinson v. Sovran Acquisition Ltd. Partnership, 70 So. 3d 390 (Alabama Court of Civil Appeals; 2011; arose from a commercial lease; bears on void or prohibited lease clauses): The lease before the court was a commercial self-storage lease, but the court described the residential act as broadly prohibiting and making unenforceable, in a residential lease agreement, any provision by which the tenant agrees to the exculpation or limitation of any liability of the landlord arising under law, pointing to the section's own comment about protecting an uninformed tenant who may surrender rights against a landlord for damages from the landlord's negligence. Read with the jury-waiver decision, it fixes the reach of that item: broad as to exculpation, narrow as to procedural waivers.

Cite this page: "Landlord Atlas, Alabama Lease Disclosure Laws & Required Lease Terms (verified September 13, 2026), landlordatlas.com/laws/lease-disclosures/alabama/" — free to cite and quote with a link (how these records are verified). Everything above is cited in the citations section below.

Alabama hazard disclosures at a glance

One row below is an in-force state duty to disclose, hand over, attach or post a hazard notice as part of renting; the federal lead-paint rule applies on top for housing built before 1978. Each row's full text, trigger, threshold and remedy are in the table above.

Hazard Status When Form Prescribed document
Lead (state add-on to the federal rule) None — — —
Mold None — — —
Bed bugs None — — —
Radon None — — —
Methamphetamine None — — —
Asbestos None — — —
Contaminated-site notice in the lease (cleanup inventories) In force At signing In the lease —

Federal rules that apply in every state

The federal layer for the lease-disclosures topic, carried once for the whole site. Every row names who it binds: most federal lease attachments bind only a landlord who takes a voucher or holds HUD-assisted or HUD-insured property, and the one rule that binds every landlord (the lead-paint disclosure rule) is a floor that state law may add to. No state record restates these rows; a state record says only where its own law references or extends them. Each row below says who it binds before it says what it requires. The full text of each row, with its citations, is on the 50-state page.

Notes and caveats

Common questions: Alabama lease disclosures

Each answer is the verified value from the table above, restated as a direct answer. Free to quote with a link to this page.

Does Alabama require a landlord to give the tenant a written statement of tenant rights?
No general statement or document is prescribed, but the statutes or rules fix some of what the lease must say, listed here. Alabama prescribes no tenant-rights statement, no summary of the residential act, no agency form, no model lease and no general lease text.
Does an Alabama landlord have to disclose the owner's name and address?
Yes — a statute requires the landlord to disclose the owner's or managing agent's identity to the tenant, in the lease or in a separate writing. A landlord, or anyone authorized to enter into a rental agreement on the landlord's behalf, must disclose to the tenant in writing at or before the tenancy begins the name and business address of the person authorized to manage the premises, and the name and business address of an owner of the premises or of a person authorized to act for the owner for service of process and for receiving and receipting for notices and demands.
Is a move-in inspection checklist required in Alabama?
No. No Alabama statute or rule requires a move-in condition report, an inventory, a checklist or a walk-through, and none exists anywhere in the residential act's forty-eight sections. Nor does the deposit section make one matter: a landlord may apply the deposit to accrued rent and to damage from the tenant's breach of the tenant's own maintenance duties, all as itemized in a written notice delivered to the tenant with the amount due within sixty days after the tenancy ends and possession is delivered, and a landlord who misses that sixty-day deadline owes the tenant double the original deposit.
What hazards must an Alabama landlord disclose to a tenant?
One in-force state hazard disclosure: contaminated-site notice in the lease (at signing). No state duty exists for lead, mold, bed bugs, radon, methamphetamine, or asbestos.
Does Alabama require flood disclosure to renters?
No. Alabama requires no flood disclosure to a tenant, and none to a buyer either, because the state has no residential property-condition disclosure statute at all. A search of the whole Code for a property condition disclosure returns nothing, and the sections that use the phrase disclosure statement are about electric cooperatives, competitive bidding, structured-settlement transfers, improvement districts and state specifications, not about residential transfers.
Does Alabama void or prohibit specific lease clauses?
Yes — the statute lists the lease provisions that are void or prohibited. Alabama's roster is short, sits in one section and is narrower than the uniform act it came from.

Citations

How this record was verified: Direct reading of the Code of Alabama on the Legislature's own code service. All 48 sections of chapter 35-9A, the Alabama Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act, were pulled from the service and read with their text and credit lines, every section stamped as refreshed on August 2, 2026, after the 2026 Regular Session adjourned on April 9, 2026; the service publishes no 'current through' sentence, so currency here rests on the enactment reading rather than on the host's own claim. Also read: section 8-9-2 (statute of frauds), section 35-4-6 (long leases), chapter 8-1A (electronic transactions), sections 22-30E-11 and the drycleaning-response chapter 22-30D, chapter 22-37A (lead reduction), and the brokerage-disclosure sections 34-27-81 and 34-27-82. Code-wide phrase searches were run with their counts and every hit enumerated, including radon with none, bed bug with none, drug lab with none, lead-based paint with four, methamphetamine with eight, clandestine with five, mold with six, asbestos with fifteen, flood with seventy-eight, sex offender with one hundred and four, landlord with eighty-eight (every hit outside chapter 35-9A read), and property condition disclosure with none, which is how the absence of any Alabama residential sales-disclosure statute was established. Administrative law: the Alabama Administrative Code on the Legislative Services Agency's own service, whose publication record gives its currency, the next issue being Volume XLIV, Issue No. 12, published September 30, 2026. Terms were run across the whole code with their counts, and the landlord-facing ones enumerated in full: landlord thirteen rules, all read; tenant thirty-eight; rental agreement nineteen; radon eight; bed bug one; lead-based paint twenty-three; methamphetamine five; mold twenty-nine; asbestos thirty-one; flood one hundred and ten. The Public Health lead chapter 420-3-29 was pulled in full, all sixteen rules, and its information-distribution rule read; the Environmental Management rule 335-16-7-.03 and the Real Estate Commission rule 790-X-3-.03 were read in full. Enactment currency by three surfaces: the Secretary of State's roll of the Acts of Alabama for 2026, read to its end and gap-checked from act 1 to act 613, with all 106 local acts read by description; the Legislature's own code-sections-affected table for the 2026 Regular Session, 1,262 rows, none of which touches chapter 35-9A; and the Legislature's act rows for the 2024 and 2025 Regular Sessions, 453 and 456, every short title and summary keyword-read. Three decisions were read in full and their later treatment checked: Ex parte Bobby Scott (In re Atlas Rental Property, LLC v. City of Center Point), No. SC-2024-0473 (Ala. Jan. 10, 2025); Coble v. Haden Development, L.L.C., 72 So. 3d 656 (Ala. Civ. App. 2011); and Robinson v. Sovran Acquisition Ltd. Partnership, 70 So. 3d 390 (Ala. Civ. App. 2011). The 2026 Regular Session adjourned sine die April 9, 2026, and Alabama bills do not carry over. Verified September 13, 2026.

What was read to state each absence on this page: