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

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.

Florida requires no written residential lease and no copy of a signed one. The act applies to the rental of a dwelling unit whether the agreement is written or oral, and it defines a rental agreement to include any written agreement, with its amendments and addenda, or an oral agreement for less than a year. Nothing in the act or the conveyances chapter requires a lease or a notice in a language other than English, and Florida sets no type size, plain-language standard or placement rule for leases. Typography appears exactly twice in the act, and both times it is a conditional legend rather than a format rule: the all-capitals deposit paragraph, and the personal-property legend that must be printed or clearly stamped on the rental agreement if the landlord wants the storage exemption. Two rules do limit what a lease may say about notice at the end of the term. A clause requiring the tenant to give notice before vacating at the end of a fixed term is lawful only if the lease also requires the landlord to give notice of non-renewal in the same window, and no lease may require less than thirty days' or more than sixty days' notice from either side. And a landlord who wants liquidated damages for a missed tenant notice must give written notice within fifteen days before the notice period starts, listing all the fees, penalties and other charges that would apply.

Statute of frauds: No action may be brought on a lease of land for a period longer than one year unless the agreement, or a note or memorandum of it, is in writing and signed by the party to be charged (section 725.01). A shorter letting may be oral, and the act itself defines a rental agreement to include an oral agreement for a duration of less than a year.

Electronic leases and signatures: Florida's electronic-transactions act excludes only wills, codicils and testamentary trusts and most of the commercial code, so a residential lease may be signed and delivered electronically; the act applies between parties who have each agreed to deal electronically, which is judged from the context and the parties' conduct. Statutory notices are different, and the difference matters. Since July 1, 2025 a landlord or tenant may e-mail the notices required by part II only if the parties have signed an addendum to the rental agreement agreeing to electronic delivery and each has given a valid e-mail address, and the addendum must be in substantially the form the statute sets out, telling both sides that the election is voluntary and may be revoked or updated at any time. A notice sent that way is treated as delivered when it is sent, unless it bounces back as undeliverable, and the sender must keep a copy of the notice and evidence that it was transmitted. Without the addendum, e-mail is not a lawful way to serve those notices.

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.

At or before the commencement of the tenancy the landlord, or a person authorized to make a rental agreement for the landlord, must disclose to the tenant in writing the name and address of the landlord or of a person authorized to receive notices and demands for the landlord. Note the peg: commencement of the tenancy, which is later than the execution of the lease, so it sits one step behind the flood and radon disclosures. Any writing satisfies it, there is no posting alternative, and no telephone number or e-mail address is required. Because the statute says the landlord or an authorized person, a tenant may lawfully be given only the agent's details. Whoever is named to receive notices keeps that authority until the tenant is told otherwise, so a change is itself a notice: notices of these names and addresses, or of changes to them, must be delivered to the tenant's residence, or to another address the tenant specifies in writing, or by e-mail where the parties have signed the electronic-notice addendum. The section states no consequence at all for failing to disclose — no damages figure, no agency by operation of law and no bar on eviction. What is left is the act's general provisions: any right or duty it declares is enforceable by civil action, and a party aggrieved by the other's failure to comply with the act or the rental agreement may recover the damages that failure caused. Florida has no statewide landlord or rental registration, and a local one would run into the act's preemption clause.

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

Florida publishes no tenant-rights document at all — no handbook, no summary of the act, no agency form and no model lease — and prescribes no wording that every written lease must carry. What it does prescribe is four blocks of statutory text, and each of them is owed only because the landlord has chosen to do something: take a deposit or advance rent, claim the exemption from storing a tenant's belongings, agree with the tenant to send notices by e-mail, or offer a fee instead of a deposit. They are listed here with that condition rather than counted as general requirements. The state's one unconditional block of prescribed wording is the radon notice, which is a hazard disclosure and is described in the hazard table, and the flood disclosure has its own prescribed form and must be a separate document.

Listed, but not a general duty counted above:

Advance rent and security deposit disclosure — words or content the lease itself must carry. A landlord who takes advance rent or a security deposit must give the tenant written notice of it, either in the lease agreement or within thirty days of receiving the money, and again within thirty days of any change in the way or the place the money is held. The notice must say where the deposit is held, or that the landlord has posted a surety bond, and whether the tenant is entitled to interest, and it must carry a paragraph the statute writes out in capitals telling the tenant about the deposit rules, the deadlines for claiming and objecting, and that the party in whose favor a judgment is rendered will generally be awarded costs and attorney fees. The paragraph closes by telling the tenant that the disclosure is basic and to read part II of chapter 83 to work out their legal rights and obligations. It is owed only where the landlord takes a deposit or advance rent, and a landlord who rents fewer than five individual dwelling units is exempt, so it is listed here rather than counted as a general requirement. Failing to give it is not a defense to paying rent when it is due. Given at signing, within a stated period, and when the information changes, delivered electronically or on paper. The statute fixes the words. Typography: The prescribed paragraph is set out in capital letters in the statute. Threshold: Does not apply to a landlord who rents fewer than five individual dwelling units, and arises only where advance rent or a deposit is taken. (§ 83.49(2)(a)–(d)) Not counted: required only because the landlord elects a practice.

Personal-property legend on the death of the last remaining tenant — words or content the lease itself must carry. A landlord who wants to be free of the statutory duties to store or dispose of a tenant's personal property after surrender, abandonment or the death of the last remaining tenant may only have that exemption if the lease, or a separate written agreement, says so — and where it is in the lease there must be printed or clearly stamped on the rental agreement a legend in substantially the words the statute sets out, in capitals, saying that by signing the agreement the tenant agrees the landlord will not be liable or responsible for storing or disposing of the tenant's personal property. A landlord who does not want the exemption need not include it, so the legend is listed here and not counted as a general requirement. Given at signing, inside the lease itself. The statute fixes the words. Typography: Printed or clearly stamped on the rental agreement, in the capitalized form the statute sets out. Threshold: Only where the landlord wants the statutory exemption from the storage duties. (§ 83.67(5))

Electronic-notice addendum — words or content the lease itself must carry. Notices required by the act may be sent by e-mail only if the parties sign an addendum to the rental agreement in substantially the form the statute sets out. The addendum has an election block for each side, each opening with the statement that notices may contain time-sensitive information about the tenant's housing and that choosing to receive them by e-mail is voluntary, followed by a box to agree or not to agree, a line for the designated address, and the right to revoke the election or update the address at any time. It is voluntary on both sides, so it is listed here and not counted as a general requirement. Given at signing, attached to the lease. The statute fixes the words. Typography: The addendum must conspicuously advise the parties that the election is voluntary and revocable. Threshold: Only where both parties choose electronic delivery of notices. (§ 83.505(1))

Fee in lieu of a security deposit: written disclosure and signed agreement — words or content the lease itself must carry. A landlord who offers the tenant the option of paying a fee instead of a security deposit must tell the tenant in writing nine things: that the tenant may pay a deposit instead of the fee at any time; that the tenant may end the fee agreement at any time; that the tenant may choose to pay the deposit in monthly installments; whether extra charges apply to either of those options; the amount payable under each option offered; that the fee is nonrefundable, where that is so; that it only secures occupancy without a deposit; that paying it does not change the obligation to pay rent and other charges; and that if the landlord uses any of the fee to buy insurance, the tenant is not insured and is not a beneficiary of that coverage. If the tenant takes the fee option, a written agreement to collect the fee must be signed by the landlord or the landlord's agent and by the tenant, may contain no clause contradicting the act's unconscionability or void-clause sections, and must state at least the amount of the fee, which may not be increased during the term, how and when it is collected, what happens and by when if the tenant stops paying the fee, that such a default will not hurt the tenant's credit rating if the deposit is paid on time, and that the agreement may be ended at any time by paying the deposit. The duty arises only where the landlord offers the option, so it is listed here and not counted as a general requirement. It applies to rental agreements entered into or renewed on or after July 1, 2023. Given before signing and at signing, handed over. The statute fixes the substance, not the words. Threshold: Only where the landlord offers a fee in lieu of a security deposit, and only for rental agreements entered into or renewed on or after July 1, 2023. (§ 83.491(3), (4)(a), (9))

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

• Where the landlord takes advance rent or a security deposit, the deposit disclosure may be placed in the lease, and it must be if the landlord does not give it separately within thirty days (section 83.49, subsection 2; landlords renting fewer than five units are exempt).

• Where the landlord wants the statutory exemption from storing a tenant's personal property, the capitalized legend, printed or clearly stamped on the rental agreement (section 83.67, subsection 5).

• Where the landlord offers a fee in lieu of a security deposit, the signed fee agreement's minimum terms, including the amount of the fee, which may not be increased during the term (section 83.491, subsection 4).

• The radon notice, which must appear on at least one document, form or application executed at or before the rental agreement and in practice is usually the lease itself (section 404.056, subsection 5).

• Any clause requiring the tenant to give notice before vacating at the end of a fixed term must also require the landlord to give notice of non-renewal in the same window, and neither side's notice period may be shorter than thirty days or longer than sixty (section 83.575, subsection 1).

• One thing that may not be in the lease: the flood disclosure must be in a separate document (section 83.512, subsection 1).

No.

Florida requires no move-in condition report, checklist, inventory or walk-through, and no claim against a deposit depends on having one: a landlord may make a claim under the act's deposit procedure with no record of the unit's condition at the start of the tenancy. The only checklist anywhere in the chapter belongs to a program rather than to tenancies generally — under the veterans property-management pilot created in 2026 a landlord gives the program administrator a copy of the move-out checklist with current photographs after a veteran tenant leaves — and that is a move-out document handed to a third party, not a move-in report.

Deposit notice at signing: Where advance rent or a security deposit is taken, the landlord must give written notice of the name and address of the depository holding it, or that a surety bond has been posted, and whether the tenant is entitled to interest, in the lease or within thirty days of receiving the money, together with a paragraph the statute writes out in capitals (section 83.49, subsection 2). Landlords renting fewer than five individual dwelling units are exempt, and failing to give the notice is not a defense to paying rent when it is due. The deposit rules themselves are on the deposits page.

One in-force state hazard disclosure: radon (before signing and at signing). Also on the books: bed bugs — a notice fired by an event during the tenancy, not a signing disclosure; no state duty exists for lead, mold, methamphetamine, asbestos, or any other hazard.

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

Lead (state add-on to the federal rule) — no state duty. Florida adds nothing to the federal lead rule for landlords: no state pamphlet, no form, no registration, no certificate, no inspection duty and no repeat disclosure. The words lead-based paint do not appear in the landlord chapter, and no rule in the administrative code puts a lead duty on a landlord letting a home.

Mold — no state duty. Florida licenses mold assessors and mold remediators and stops there. There is no mold disclosure, no notice duty and no habitability standard naming mold, and nothing in the administrative code adds one for a residential tenancy.

Bed bugs — a notice fired by an event during the tenancy, not a signing disclosure, in writing (a statute). Florida has no bed-bug disclosure. A landlord need not tell a prospective tenant about an infestation, past or present, in the unit or nearby. What the law requires is a notice during the tenancy: in a dwelling unit other than a single-family home or duplex, the landlord must make reasonable provisions at all times for the extermination of rats, mice, roaches, ants, wood-destroying organisms and bedbugs, and where the tenant must temporarily vacate for that extermination, the landlord must give seven days' written notice, in person, by mail or by e-mail where the electronic-notice addendum has been signed. The tenant may be required to leave for no more than four days, and the rent abates while they are out. The duty covers every pest on that list, not bed bugs in particular, and the whole subsection can be displaced by a contrary written agreement. Threshold: Dwelling units other than a single-family home or duplex, and the whole subsection yields to a contrary written agreement. The section states no penalty for a missing notice. The landlord is not liable for damages for the interruption but must abate the rent for the period the tenant is out. The act's general routes remain: a right or duty it declares is enforceable by civil action, and a party aggrieved by non-compliance may recover the damages it caused.

Radon — in force — a state duty, before signing and at signing, in writing (a statute). Florida is one of the few states that puts a radon notice on every landlord, and the wording is fixed by statute rather than by an agency form. The notice must appear on at least one document, form or application executed at the time of, or before, the execution of a rental agreement for any building, so the lease, an application or an addendum all qualify. It tells the reader that radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas which, when it has accumulated in a building in sufficient quantities, may present health risks to people exposed to it over time; that levels of radon exceeding federal and state guidelines have been found in buildings in Florida; and that more information about radon and radon testing may be obtained from the county health department. Nothing turns on whether the landlord knows anything about this particular building, no test is required and no map is consulted. The requirement does not apply to residential transient occupancy of forty-five days or less. Threshold: Reaches any building, commercial buildings included, with one carve-out: residential transient occupancy of forty-five days or less. There is no knowledge test, no zone test and no unit-count or building-age limit. The section states no penalty for a missing notice. The department has rule-making power for the section, and no rule imposes a sanction.

Methamphetamine — no state duty. Florida has no methamphetamine contamination law at all: no disclosure, no remediation standard, no certificate and no bar on renting a unit where the drug was once made. The word appears in the statutes only in the criminal code, in the trafficking and precursor-sale provisions.

Asbestos — no state duty. Florida requires no asbestos disclosure to a tenant. Its asbestos law licenses consultants and contractors and governs asbestos litigation; the environmental rules that mention asbestos concern notification, air permits and waste, and none of them reaches a lease.

Other hazard notices (pesticide, pool safety, ordnance, sinkhole, smoking) — no state duty. No Florida statute or rule requires a pesticide-application notice, a pest-control-contract disclosure, a pool or water-safety notice, a military ordnance or noise-zone notice, a shared-well notice, a sinkhole notice or a smoking-policy disclosure to a residential tenant. Two provisions come close and neither is a disclosure: the landlord of a single-family home or duplex must install working smoke detection devices at the start of the tenancy, which is an installation duty, and the act restricts flotation bedding, which is a use rule. Two 2026 bills would have created a water-safety disclosure for residential rentals and both died when the session ended.

Yes — a statute requires the landlord to disclose whether the property has flooded within a stated period or a stated number of times to a prospective or current tenant, in a separate document.

Since October 1, 2025 a Florida landlord must complete and give a prospective tenant a flood disclosure at or before the rental agreement is executed, but only where the term is a year or longer. The disclosure must be in a separate document — it is the one Florida disclosure that may not be folded into the lease — and must be in substantially the form the statute sets out. It opens by warning that renters' insurance policies do not cover damage from floods and encouraging the tenant to discuss separate flood insurance with their agent. Then come three statements the landlord must answer: whether the landlord has knowledge of any flooding that has damaged the dwelling unit during the landlord's ownership; whether the landlord has filed a claim with an insurance provider relating to flood damage in the unit, including with the national flood insurance program; and whether the landlord has received assistance for flood damage to the unit, including from the federal emergency management agency. The form then defines flooding as a general or temporary condition of partial or complete inundation of the unit caused by the overflow of inland or tidal waters, by the unusual and rapid accumulation of runoff or surface water from an established water source such as a river, stream or drainage ditch, or by sustained periods of standing water resulting from rainfall. Everything turns on what has happened to this unit while this landlord has owned it. There is no flood-map lookup, no special flood hazard area determination and no elevation test anywhere in the section, so a landlord who bought recently and has had no flooding answers no to all three however the property is mapped. Buyers get a near-identical disclosure from sellers under the conveyances chapter, and the same 2025 act put parallel duties on mobile home park owners and on condominium and cooperative developers.

Threshold: Only leases for a term of one year or longer. A month-to-month tenancy, or any lease of eleven months or less, gets no flood disclosure at all. If the duty is not met: The remedy is doubly conditional. If the landlord violates the section and the tenant then suffers substantial loss or damage to personal property as a result of flooding, the tenant may end the rental agreement by giving written notice of termination and surrendering possession no later than thirty days after the date of the damage or loss; termination takes effect on surrender. Substantial loss or damage means the total cost of repairing or replacing the personal property is fifty percent or more of its market value on the date the flooding occurred. The landlord must then refund everything the tenant paid in advance for any period after termination, and the tenant stays liable for what was owed before it. A landlord who simply never gives the disclosure faces nothing under the section unless the unit later floods badly.

Yes — of the facts the rule names, some need not be disclosed and no cause of action arises from not disclosing some, each as stated here.

Florida law says that the fact that an occupant of real property is or has been infected with HIV or diagnosed with AIDS is not a material fact that must be disclosed in a real estate transaction, and that the same is true of the fact that a property was, or was at any time suspected to have been, the site of a homicide, suicide or death. It adds that no cause of action arises against an owner of real property, the owner's agent, an agent of a transferee, or a licensed real estate professional for failing to disclose those things. Two limits are worth stating plainly. The no-duty rule speaks of a real estate transaction without defining it, while the bar on suing is framed around a transferee, which reads more like a sale than a lease, so the protection from being sued may be narrower than the rule about what is material. And unlike some states, Florida does not go on to say what happens if a tenant asks directly: there is no duty to answer a written question and no bar on answering one.

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

Florida's roster is two lines long and sits in one section: a lease provision is void and unenforceable to the extent that it waives or precludes the rights, remedies or requirements of the act, or limits or precludes either party's liability arising under law. The words to the extent that matter — the clause falls only so far as it offends, and the rest of the lease stands. The roster binds both sides: the liability limb names the landlord's liability to the tenant and the tenant's to the landlord, and the damages remedy runs to whichever party is aggrieved. Behind the roster sits a general unconscionability power: a court that finds a rental agreement or any provision of it unconscionable when it was made may refuse to enforce the agreement, enforce the rest of it without the offending provision, or limit the provision's application to avoid an unconscionable result, after giving the parties a reasonable chance to present evidence about its meaning, the relationship of the parties, its purpose and its effect. Florida has no separate bar on confessions of judgment, distraint, jury waivers or attorney-fee clauses; the conduct those rules usually target is dealt with as prohibited landlord conduct instead. Two related rules sit outside the roster: the act's attorney-fee right cannot be waived in a lease (section 83.48), and an agreement to collect a fee in lieu of a security deposit may not contain a clause that contradicts the act's unconscionability or void-clause sections (section 83.491, subsection 4).

Actual damages flow from the mere inclusion of the clause.

Sanction as the statute states it: Where a void and unenforceable provision is included in a rental agreement entered into, extended or renewed after the act took effect, and either party suffers actual damages as a result of the inclusion, the aggrieved party may recover those damages. Nothing turns on whether the landlord knew the clause was void, and no attempt to enforce it is needed — but the claimant must show real loss flowing from the inclusion, and the remedy runs both ways.

The listed provisions:

• A provision that purports to waive or preclude the rights, remedies or requirements set out in part II of the act.

• A provision that purports to limit or preclude any liability of the landlord to the tenant, or of the tenant to the landlord, arising under law.

A statute awards attorney fees to whichever party prevails in the actions it names, without converting lease clauses.

In any civil action brought to enforce the rental agreement or the act, the party in whose favor a judgment or decree is rendered may recover reasonable attorney fees and court costs from the party who did not prevail. The award comes from the statute rather than from anything the lease says, so it does not depend on a fee clause and does not convert one. Two limits are part of the rule: the right to fees under the section may not be waived in a lease agreement, and fees are not available in a claim for personal injury damages based on a breach of the landlord's maintenance duties. Elsewhere in the act, a tenant who wins a claim over prohibited landlord conduct such as a utility cut-off or a lockout recovers costs including attorney fees on top of the damages.