Landlord Atlas

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

Verified September 13, 2026 All Georgia topics →

Every Georgia landlord must disclose the owner's or agent's identity in writing and give the statutory flood notice, and a landlord who takes a security deposit must also give a list of existing damage.

Cited to O.C.G.A. § 44-7-1 (a)–(b) and 26 more cited sources · Verified September 13, 2026

Before or when the tenancy begins the landlord must give the tenant, in writing, the names and addresses of the owner of record or a person authorized to take service, and of whoever manages the property, with 30 days to report any change. And before entering a written lease the landlord must tell the tenant in writing that the property is prone to flooding, if flooding has damaged the tenant's own living space at least three times in the last five years. A third, the move-in list of existing damage, is owed only where a security deposit is taken, and not at all by a natural person whose household owns ten or fewer units and pays nobody to manage them. Georgia requires no lease copy, no tenant-rights handbook, no lead, radon, mold, bed-bug, asbestos or methamphetamine disclosure, and no written lease at all for a term of a year or less. Seven bodies of law cannot be waived by either side, and a clause making the tenant pay the landlord's attorney fees is void unless it also makes the landlord pay the tenant's.

Georgia lease disclosures at a glance

Which law governs Georgia's residential rules sit in chapter 44-7 of the Code. Article 1 carries the writing threshold, the anti-waiver rule and the attorney-fee rule (section 44-7-2), the owner and agent disclosure (section 44-7-3), the local security-standards authorization (section 44-7-4), the flood notice (section 44-7-20) and the rent-regulation preemption (section 44-7-19). Article 2 carries the security deposit rules, including the move-in damage list and the escrow-location notice, and the exemption that decides who they bind. Georgia has no residential property condition disclosure act — it is a caveat-emptor state on the sales side — so the disclosure rules that reach a lease are the ones in chapter 44-7 plus three scattered provisions elsewhere in the Code: the immunity for not disclosing a stigmatized history and the agricultural proximity notice in chapter 44-1, and the water and waste-water charging section in the water title. The one hazard rule that reaches a tenant is in the administrative code, under the Department of Natural Resources' lead-based paint rules.
Who is covered Most of this page is statewide and unconditioned: the owner and agent disclosure, the flood notice, the anti-waiver rule and the attorney-fee rule reach every residential tenancy in Georgia, with no unit count and no owner-type carve-out. One exemption matters, and it is narrower than it is usually described. The security deposit sections — the escrow or bond duty, the move-in damage list and the forfeiture remedy — do not apply to rental units owned by a natural person if that person, their spouse and their minor children collectively own ten or fewer rental units, and the exemption is lost for any unit whose management, including rent collection, is performed by third persons, natural or otherwise, for a fee. Three consequences follow. A company, limited liability company, partnership or trust gets no exemption at any number of units. The children counted are minor children. And an otherwise exempt owner who pays an agent to manage and collect rent is covered again. The flood notice carries two limits of its own: it attaches before entering a written agreement, and it reaches leaseholds entered into on or after July 1, 1995.
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 Georgia statute requires a residential lease to be in writing, and a tenancy of one year or less may be created by word of mouth. Georgia's periodic tenancy is the tenancy at will rather than a month-to-month tenancy, which is why the notice periods on the lease-termination page read differently from other states. There is no duty anywhere in the chapter to give the tenant a copy of the signed lease. The one document a landlord must hand over and let the tenant keep is the move-in damage list, and that duty is part of the deposit rules. Georgia prescribes no translation duty, no plain-language act and no type-size, typeface or placement rule for residential leases.

Statute of frauds: Contracts creating the relationship of landlord and tenant for any time not exceeding one year may be made by word of mouth (section 44-7-2, subsection a). Read with the rule that a letting for less than five years conveys only the right to possess and enjoy, the practical threshold is one year: a tenancy of a year or less may be oral, and a longer term must be in writing. Georgia's general statute of frauds separately reaches contracts concerning land and agreements that cannot be performed within a year.

Electronic leases and signatures: The landlord-tenant chapter says nothing at all about electronic execution or electronic delivery: the word does not appear anywhere in it, and Georgia has no rule of the kind some states have letting a landlord switch a required notice to email once the tenant supplies an address. Georgia's general electronic transactions act sits elsewhere in the Code and is not set out on this page.
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.

At or before the commencement of a tenancy, the landlord, or an agent or other person authorized to enter into a rental agreement on the landlord's behalf, must disclose to the tenant in writing the names and addresses of two persons: the owner of record of the premises, or a person authorized to act for the owner in serving process and receiving and receipting for demands and notices; and the person authorized to manage the premises. Both limbs are mandatory — the second is not optional, whatever some summaries say — and no telephone number or email address is required. The statute says in writing, so the lease or a separate writing will do; there is no posting alternative for the first disclosure. When any of those names or addresses changes, the landlord must advise each tenant within 30 days, either in writing or by posting a notice of the change in a conspicuous place, and a change of the owner of record is such a change. No threshold applies: the duty binds every residential landlord in Georgia, including a natural person with a single unit, because the ten-or-fewer exemption reaches only the deposit sections. A person who signs a rental agreement for an owner or landlord and does not comply becomes an agent of the owner or landlord for service of process, for receiving and receipting for notices and demands, for performing the landlord's obligations under the chapter, and for spending the rent collected from the premises on those obligations. That is the whole sanction: no damages figure, no termination right and no rent withholding. Georgia has no statewide landlord registration, and local governments are forbidden to require one. Since July 1, 2025 a landlord who does not live in Georgia and owns single-family or duplex residential rental property must employ a broker licensed in Georgia, and where that broker is also out of state, the broker must employ at least one person located in Georgia responsible for receiving, coordinating, managing and responding to tenant communications about maintenance and other issues. That is a staffing duty; the section does not require anyone to tell the tenant who that person is.
Required statements and lease text

No.

Georgia requires no tenant-rights statement, no summary of the law, no handbook and no prescribed general lease text, and it prescribes no list of subjects a residential lease must contain. The Department of Community Affairs publishes a Georgia Landlord Tenant Handbook, revised August 29, 2024 and offered in English and Spanish, but no statute or rule requires a landlord to give it to anyone: it is the agency's description of the law, and its own cover says it may not be up to date. It is checked weekly here rather than delivered, and at least one of its summaries is narrower than the statute it describes. Two prescribed texts do exist in Georgia law, and neither is a rights statement: the agricultural and silvicultural proximity notice, which is set out with the location disclosures below, and the warning that must appear on the move-in and move-out damage lists telling the tenant of the duty to sign or to dissent.
Move-in condition report

Yes, where a security deposit is taken.

Before a tenant tenders a security deposit, the landlord must present the tenant with a comprehensive list of any existing damage to the premises, and the list is the tenant's to keep permanently. The tenant may inspect the premises before taking occupancy to check that the list is accurate. Both parties sign it, and a signed list is conclusive evidence of its accuracy except as to latent defects. A tenant who refuses to sign must instead state in writing the specific items dissented from and sign that statement, and the list itself must carry written notice of the tenant's duty to sign or to dissent. The duty is keyed to the deposit, not to the letting: a Georgia landlord who takes no security deposit never has to produce the list. Nor does it reach a landlord who is exempt from the deposit sections — a natural person whose household owns ten or fewer rental units and does not pay a third party to manage and collect the rent. The consequence of skipping it is severe: a landlord who did not make and present the initial damage list may not retain any part of the deposit, and a failure to provide the lists within the statutory time also forfeits the right to sue the tenant for damage to the premises.

When and who signs: Before the tenant tenders the security deposit, and in any event before occupancy: the tenant's right to inspect the premises to check the list runs prior to taking occupancy. Both the landlord and the tenant sign the list.

Deposit notice at signing: Tenants must be informed in writing of the location of the escrow account holding the security deposit (section 44-7-31), with a surety bond as the alternative to an escrow account. The same natural-person exemption applies, and the deposit cap, the 30-day return and the treble-damages remedy are on the security-deposits page.
Hazard disclosures

No in-force state hazard disclosure duty applies at signing beyond the federal lead-paint rule. Also on the books: lead — a notice fired by an event during the tenancy, not a signing disclosure; no state duty exists for mold, bed bugs, radon, methamphetamine, asbestos, or any other hazard.

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

Lead (state add-on to the federal rule) — a notice fired by an event during the tenancy, not a signing disclosure, in a separate document (an administrative rule). Georgia adds no lead disclosure at lease signing: there is no state lease warning, no state form, no registration and no certificate. What it has is a renovation notice. No more than 60 days before starting renovation work in a dwelling unit of older target housing, the firm doing the work must give the owner the lead hazard pamphlet and either get a written acknowledgment or obtain a certificate of mailing at least seven days before the work; and where the owner does not live in the unit, it must do the same for an adult occupant, with a written certification of delivery as an alternative. For work in the common areas of multi-unit target housing, every affected unit must be notified in writing of the general nature and location of the work, its expected start and end dates and how to get the pamphlet, or informational signs must be posted, with fresh notice if the scope, locations or dates change. The acknowledgment form must be a separate sheet or part of the renovation contract, and in housing the owner does not occupy it must be in the same language as the lease or the pamphlet. The trigger is the renovation, never the letting. Threshold: Target housing, meaning the pre-1978 housing the rule defines. The rules bind everyone engaged in renovation and lead-based paint activities except a person working on a dwelling they own, unless someone other than the owner or the owner's immediate family is living in it while the work is done — which is what brings a landlord renovating an occupied rental inside them. The common-area notice applies to multi-unit target housing. A signed acknowledgment is taken. Enforcement is by the Environmental Protection Division under its own rules and the lead act; the rule states no remedy for a tenant.

Mold — no state duty. Georgia has no mold statute and no mold rule, and nothing requires a landlord to disclose mold to a tenant. The word does not appear in the landlord-tenant chapter; the two occurrences in the public health title create no duty; and neither the environmental protection chapter of the rules, enumerated to its 33 subjects, nor the environmental health hazards chapter, enumerated to its 8, has a mold subject. Mold in a rented home is a repair question, on the habitability page.

Bed bugs — no state duty. Georgia has no bed-bug law of any kind reaching a residential tenancy: no disclosure before renting, no notice during the tenancy, no inspection duty and no rule about who pays for treatment. The words appear nowhere in the landlord-tenant chapter, and the structural pest control rules cover wood-destroying organisms, household pest control, fumigation and honeybee removal, with their one contract-disclosure duty owed to the property owner who signs the contract rather than to a tenant.

Radon — no state duty. Georgia has no radon statute and no radon rule, and no landlord owes a tenant any radon disclosure, warning or test result. The word appears nowhere in the landlord-tenant chapter, nowhere in the public health, natural resources or buildings titles, and there is no radon subject in either the environmental protection or the environmental health hazards chapter of the rules.

Methamphetamine — no state duty. Georgia has no clandestine drug laboratory remediation act and no methamphetamine disclosure at all — no duty to tell a prospective tenant that a unit was used to make the drug, no clean-up standard a landlord must meet first, and no bar on letting the unit. Neither word appears in the landlord-tenant chapter or in the public health, natural resources or buildings titles, and no decontamination subject exists among the environmental protection chapter's 33 subjects; the nearest rules govern hazardous waste management and hazardous site response and create no notice to an occupant. Georgia turns up on circulated methamphetamine-disclosure lists, and it does not belong there.

Asbestos — no state duty. No Georgia statute or rule requires an asbestos disclosure to a tenant. The Georgia Asbestos Safety Act is a contractor licensing, notification and work-practice regime and nothing in it runs to an occupant; the asbestos removal and encapsulation rules mention neither landlord, lessor, tenant, rental nor disclosure anywhere in them; and the Asbestos Licensing Board's own chapters have all been repealed.

Pesticide, ordnance, pool and detector notices — no state duty. Georgia requires no pesticide-application notice to tenants, no military-ordnance or noise-zone notice, no tenant-facing pool-safety notice — the state's pool rules govern public swimming pools, spas and recreational water parks and bind their operators — and no written acknowledgment of a smoke alarm or carbon-monoxide detector. Installing and maintaining detectors is a repair and building-code subject, on the habitability page.
Flood disclosure

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 writing.

Georgia has one of the oldest flood-disclosure statutes in the country for renters, and it is invisible to surveys that look for flood maps, because the trigger is a flooding count rather than a zone. When an owner, directly or through an agent, seeks to lease residential property, the owner must notify the prospective tenant in writing of the property's propensity of flooding, before entering a written agreement, if flooding has damaged any portion of the living space covered by the lease at least three times during the five-year period immediately preceding the date of the lease. Flooding is defined: inundation of a portion of the covered living space caused either by an increased water level in an established water source such as a river, stream or drainage ditch, or by a ponding of water at or near the point where heavy or excessive rain fell. Nothing else is prescribed — no form, no wording, no type size and no acknowledgment — so a sentence in the lease or a separate letter both work. A 2026 Code revision act reworded the definition sentence without changing its meaning, and that version has been in force since July 1, 2026.

Threshold: The duty attaches before entering a written agreement, and the space that flooded must be living space covered by the lease, or an attachment to it, to which the tenant or the tenant's resident relative has sole and exclusive use under that written agreement — so a common area or a shared space flooding does not set it off. It applies to leaseholds entered into on or after July 1, 1995. There is no unit count and no owner-type carve-out. If the duty is not met: An owner who fails to give the notice is liable in tort to the tenant, and to the tenant's family residing on the leased premises, for damage to the personal property of the tenant or a resident relative proximately caused by flooding that occurs during the term of the lease. That is narrower in kind than it is often described — real-property damage and the tenancy itself are untouched, and there is no termination right, no statutory damages figure, no rent abatement and no agency enforcement — but wider in who may sue. The Court of Appeals has also treated the section as supporting a negligence claim based on its breach, while applying its three-times, five-year and named-water-source elements strictly.
Disclosures about the property's situation One prescribed notice reaches a prospective tenant, and it is about farming. Before any purchase, lease or other acquisition of real property in a county that has land zoned for agricultural or silvicultural use, an owner or the owner's agent who knows that the property is within, partially within or adjacent to land zoned or identified on an approved county land use plan for such use must deliver to the prospective lessee a notice whose words the statute sets out: that it is the policy of the state and the community to conserve and encourage farm and forest land, and that farm and forest activities occur in the area and may include intensive operations causing noises, odors, fumes, dust, smoke, insects, machinery operating at any hour, storage and disposal of manure, and the spraying of fertilizers, soil amendments, herbicides and pesticides, one or more of which may be an inconvenience even though the activities conform to law and accepted practice. The notice does not apply to title passing by foreclosure, deed in lieu of foreclosure, tax deed, deed to secure debt or from an executor or administrator, and it reaches transactions entered into on or after July 1, 1995. Failing to give it does not affect title, does not prevent a document being recorded, and — in the statute's own words — creates no cause of action for damages or equitable relief. Beyond that, Georgia requires nothing: no sex-offender registry notice, no death-in-unit notice, no military-ordnance or noise-zone notice, no demolition or condominium-conversion notice, and no notice that the property is in foreclosure or under contract for sale.
What need not be disclosed

Yes — no cause of action arises from not disclosing the facts the rule names.

No cause of action arises against an owner of real property, a real estate broker or an affiliated licensee of the broker for failing to disclose, in a real estate transaction, that the property is or was occupied by a person infected with a virus or another disease that medical evidence has determined is highly unlikely to be transmitted through occupying a dwelling place, or that the property was the site of a homicide or other felony, a suicide, or a death by accidental or natural causes. The section speaks of any real estate transaction and does not define the phrase; on its terms it reaches a residential letting, and the owner is named alongside the broker. The silence is protected, but the answer is not: an owner, broker or licensee must answer truthfully, to the best of that person's own knowledge, any question about those matters, unless answering would violate a federal or state law, expressly including the federal Fair Housing Act and Georgia's fair housing law. Revealing the information in accordance with the section creates no liability either, and a violation creates liability only on a finding of fraud. A 2026 Code revision act deleted a spent sentence from the section that cross-referenced a Code section repealed in 2006.
Utility, fee and payment disclosures Georgia's one fee-side disclosure is about water. The owner or operator of a building containing residential units may charge tenants separately for water and waste-water service only on two conditions: that the total charged to the tenants does not exceed the total the owner or operator pays for that service for the building, plus a reasonable fee for establishing, servicing and billing it; and that the terms of the charges are disclosed to the tenants before any contractual agreement. The section prescribes no form and no wording and states no penalty for failing to disclose. Around it sit rules that are not disclosures: every new multi-unit residential building permitted on or after July 1, 2012 must be built so that water use can be measured for each unit; where the cost is recovered through an allocation method, it must be based on the measured quantity of water each unit used, may include a share of common-area use, and is subject to the same cost-plus-reasonable-billing-fee cap; and an owner is not liable for billing or meter-reading errors made by an unaffiliated third-party billing company. Nothing else in this family exists. Georgia has no shared-meter or master-meter disclosure for electricity or gas, no rule that every fee must be stated in the lease, no rent-receipt or payment-method or payment-location rule, no rent-concession disclosure, no renters' insurance requirement, no smoking-policy disclosure and no rent-reporting disclosure. A non-refundable fee is defined in the deposit article and excluded from the meaning of a security deposit, which is a definition rather than a duty. One utility rule is a prohibition: a landlord may not knowingly and willfully suspend cooling, heat, light or water service to a tenant until after the final disposition of an eviction proceeding, on pain of a fine of up to $500. Late fees are on the late-fee page, application and screening fees on their own page, and the deposit money rules, including the two-months cap and the 30-day return, on the security-deposits page.
Lease clauses that are void or prohibited

No enumerated list — Georgia does not publish a roster of forbidden clauses. It does something different, and broader in one way and narrower in another: in any contract, lease, license agreement or similar agreement, oral or written, for the use or rental of real property as a dwelling place, a landlord or a tenant may not waive, assign, transfer or otherwise avoid the rights, duties or remedies in seven named bodies of law. The bar runs both ways — it names the tenant as well as the landlord — and it reaches oral tenancies as squarely as written ones. What it does not do is penalize the drafting: a clause that offends it is unenforceable and nothing more. The Supreme Court of Georgia has held that exculpatory clauses in residential leases cannot defeat the landlord's repair duty, expressly overruling the cases that conflicted with the public policy of the 1976 enactment, and has confirmed that the third limb protects duties created by local housing codes. Two other provisions void a lease outright and belong to other pages: a letting for the purpose of prostitution or assignation is void, and the service-member and family-violence termination rights may not be waived or modified by agreement under any circumstances.

Sanction as the statute states it: The offending provision simply cannot be given effect. Georgia states no damages figure, no multiple of rent, no sanction for deliberately using a prohibited clause, no fee shift and no cure window anywhere in the chapter.

The general provisions:

• The landlord's duties as to repairs and improvements, including the implied provision that the premises are fit for human habitation (section 44-7-13).

• The landlord's liability for failure to repair (section 44-7-14).

• Local ordinances adopted under the unfit-dwelling statute (section 36-61-11), which the anti-waiver rule protects from being contracted away.

• The dispossessory article of the chapter, so a lease may not contract around the demand for possession and the notice the eviction statute requires (Article 3).

• The distress-warrant article (Article 4).

• The whole security deposit article, including the move-in damage list, the escrow-location notice and the forfeiture remedy (Article 2).

• Any applicable provision of the Civil Practice Act that the chapter has not superseded (Title 9, chapter 11).
Attorney-fee clauses

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

A clause making the tenant pay the landlord's attorney fees on the tenant's breach is void unless the same provision also makes the landlord pay the tenant's attorney fees on the landlord's breach. That is a ban with a cure written into it: the one-way clause fails, and the identical clause drafted to run both ways stands and is enforceable. Georgia does not do what New York and California do — it voids the one-way clause rather than reading a reciprocal right into it, so a tenant faced with a one-way clause is left with no fee right at all rather than with the landlord's. No statute awards fees to a prevailing party in a residential case. The chapter grants fees in only two places, both to the tenant: for retaliation, where the landlord's conduct was willful, wanton or malicious, on top of a civil penalty of one month's rent plus $500 and costs; and for a security deposit wrongly withheld, where the tenant recovers three times the sum withheld plus reasonable attorney's fees, reduced to the sum withheld if the landlord proves a bona fide error.
When, how, and what happens on a failure Georgia's duties peg to three moments and carry very different consequences. At or before the commencement of the tenancy: the written owner, agent and manager identity disclosure, with no acknowledgment required, and a further notice within 30 days of any change, which may be given in writing or by posting in a conspicuous place. Before entering a written agreement: the flood notice, in writing, where the living space has flooded three times in five years, and — where the owner knows the property sits in or beside land zoned for farming or forestry — the agricultural proximity notice in the words the statute sets out. Before the tenant tenders a security deposit: the comprehensive list of existing damage, signed by both parties, kept permanently by the tenant, and carrying its own warning about the duty to sign or dissent. Before any contractual agreement: the terms of a water and waste-water charge, where the landlord bills for it separately. And on an event rather than at letting: the lead pamphlet before a renovation, which is the only duty here requiring a signed acknowledgment besides the damage list. Nothing in the chapter provides for electronic delivery or electronic consent. The remedies are uneven. Failing to disclose the owner and manager makes the person who signed the agreement the owner's agent for service, for performing the landlord's obligations and for spending collected rent on them, and nothing more. Failing to give the damage list forfeits the right to keep any of the deposit and the right to sue the tenant for damage to the premises. Failing to give the flood notice creates tort liability for damage to personal property caused by flooding during the term. The water-charge disclosure states no penalty at all, and the agricultural notice expressly creates no cause of action for damages or equitable relief. A clause that offends the anti-waiver rule is simply unenforceable, and Georgia's consumer-protection act is never referenced in the chapter, so there is no unfair-practices route behind these duties.
Can cities add their own rules

Partly — state law preempts local rules on some subjects and leaves others to the locality or open.

Georgia preempts two subjects, authorizes two, and says nothing about the one this page is about. Preempted: no county or municipality may enact, maintain or enforce an ordinance or resolution regulating in any way the amount of rent charged for privately owned single-family or multiple-unit residential rental property, though a local government may still set rents for property it owns or agree rents with private parties; and no local government may require the registration of residential rental property, or investigate or inspect a residential rental without probable cause to believe there is or has been a code violation, with plain-view conditions capable of supplying that cause. The registration bar is not new — it has been law since 2012 — and a 2025 act added to it a tenant-side duty to give a code enforcement officer, on request, the name, license number and contact details of a licensed property manager. Authorized: municipalities and counties may establish minimum security standards by local ordinance, not in conflict with the fire codes, to prevent unauthorized entry of premises occupied by a tenant, and may require landlords to comply with them; and a municipality or county may by ordinance require the repair, closing or demolition of dwellings unfit for human habitation. The anti-waiver rule then protects those unfit-dwelling ordinances from being contracted away in a lease. Silent: no Georgia statute preempts or authorizes local lease-disclosure or lease-content ordinances by name. No Georgia city carries a lease-packet rule on this page.
How state law refers to the federal rules Georgia publishes no lead pamphlet of its own. Its renovation rule defines the pamphlet a renovator must hand over as the federal environmental agency's own publication, or a state pamphlet that agency has approved, so Georgia runs its program on the federal document. No Georgia statute references or extends a federal disclosure rule, and what the state adds over the federal renovation program is its own accreditation, certification, clearance and fee regime rather than a new disclosure.
Changes already signed into law No signed act is waiting beyond any not-yet-in-force duty already stated on this page
Leading court decisions

Ellis v. Hartford Run Apartments, LLC, 335 Ga. App. 118, 779 S.E.2d 103 (Court of Appeals of Georgia; 2015; residential setting; bears on flood disclosure): Tenants of an apartment complex could not rely on the flood-notice statute where they did not allege that their living space had flooded at least three times in the five years before their lease because of an increased water level in a river, stream or drainage ditch or a ponding of water; the statute was inapplicable and the landlord was entitled to summary judgment on that claim. The decision applies the three-times, five-year and named-water-source elements strictly and together, and treats a breach of the section as capable of supporting a negligence claim.

Country Club Apartments, Inc. v. Scott, 246 Ga. 443, 271 S.E.2d 841 (Supreme Court of Georgia; 1980; residential setting; bears on void or prohibited lease clauses): An exculpatory clause in a residential lease cannot defeat the landlord's statutory repair duty, the court expressly overruling all cases in conflict with the public policy set out in the 1970 and 1976 enactments. This is the decision that makes the anti-waiver rule operative rather than merely declaratory.

Thompson v. Crownover, 259 Ga. 126, 377 S.E.2d 660 (Supreme Court of Georgia; 1989; residential setting; bears on void or prohibited lease clauses): The 1976 statute forbids landlords from avoiding their duty of repair, their liability for failure to repair, and their duties created by housing codes. The third limb is what confirms that a residential lease may not contract around duties imposed by local ordinances adopted under the unfit-dwelling statute.

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

Georgia hazard disclosures at a glance

No row below is an in-force state duty to disclose, hand over, attach or post a hazard notice; the federal lead-paint rule still applies to 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) Event-driven notice only — Separate document —
Mold None — — —
Bed bugs None — — —
Radon None — — —
Methamphetamine None — — —
Asbestos None — — —
Pesticide, ordnance, pool and detector notices None — — —

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: Georgia 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 Georgia require a landlord to give the tenant a written statement of tenant rights?
No. Georgia requires no tenant-rights statement, no summary of the law, no handbook and no prescribed general lease text, and it prescribes no list of subjects a residential lease must contain. The Department of Community Affairs publishes a Georgia Landlord Tenant Handbook, revised August 29, 2024 and offered in English and Spanish, but no statute or rule requires a landlord to give it to anyone: it is the agency's description of the law, and its own cover says it may not be up to date.
Does a Georgia 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. At or before the commencement of a tenancy, the landlord, or an agent or other person authorized to enter into a rental agreement on the landlord's behalf, must disclose to the tenant in writing the names and addresses of two persons: the owner of record of the premises, or a person authorized to act for the owner in serving process and receiving and receipting for demands and notices; and the person authorized to manage the premises.
Is a move-in inspection checklist required in Georgia?
Yes, where a security deposit is taken. Before a tenant tenders a security deposit, the landlord must present the tenant with a comprehensive list of any existing damage to the premises, and the list is the tenant's to keep permanently.
What hazards must a Georgia landlord disclose to a tenant?
No in-force state hazard disclosure duty applies at signing beyond the federal lead-paint rule. Also on the books: lead — a notice fired by an event during the tenancy, not a signing disclosure; no state duty exists for mold, bed bugs, radon, methamphetamine, asbestos, or any other hazard.
Does Georgia require flood disclosure to renters?
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 writing. Georgia has one of the oldest flood-disclosure statutes in the country for renters, and it is invisible to surveys that look for flood maps, because the trigger is a flooding count rather than a zone.
Does Georgia void or prohibit specific lease clauses?
No enumerated list — Georgia does not publish a roster of forbidden clauses. It does something different, and broader in one way and narrower in another: in any contract, lease, license agreement or similar agreement, oral or written, for the use or rental of real property as a dwelling place, a landlord or a tenant may not waive, assign, transfer or otherwise avoid the rights, duties or remedies in seven named bodies of law.

Citations

How this record was verified: Direct reading of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, chapter 44-7 (landlord and tenant), from a section-by-section reading of all 79 section documents of Articles 1 through 6 including the future-effective versions, taken on August 20, 2026 from the Code Revision Commission's designated public-access viewer, every document carrying the line 'Current through the 2026 Special Session of the General Assembly'; every section cited here was located in that text before it was cited, and every negative rests on enumerated term counts over the whole of it. The administrative code was read on the Secretary of State's own rules site, current through rules filed through September 2, 2026, by browse enumeration rather than by keyword, because the site's search page returns no result rows in its served markup: the 156-department index, then the chapter lists of departments 110, 111, 120, 290, 391, 511, 520, 550, 620 and 52, then chapter 391-3 enumerated to its 33 subjects and chapter 511-3 to its 8, with subjects 391-3-24 (lead-based paint hazard management), 391-3-14 (asbestos removal and encapsulation), 620-6 and 620-7 (structural pest control) and 520-1 (real estate licensure and brokerage) read whole and term counts recorded. Enactment currency was established two independent ways that reconcile: a per-section amendment ledger built from every session-law credit line in the 79 section documents, and an enumeration of 2,570 signed acts on the Governor's own signed-legislation indexes for 2020 through 2026 and the 2026 special session, with the vetoed-legislation indexes checked for the same period and every disposition read from the act itself; 266 act texts covering property, water, health, contracts, environment, natural resources, real estate, conveyances, land and Code revision were read and searched for the section numbers that sit outside the chapter read, returning exactly two amendments, both editorial. Three decisions were read in full in the official reporters: Ellis v. Hartford Run Apartments, Country Club Apartments v. Scott and Thompson v. Crownover. Five sections outside the chapter read — the water and waste-water charging section, the agricultural proximity notice, the stigma immunity, the general statute of frauds and the unfit-dwelling ordinance authorization — could not be read on an official source for this page and are marked for a further official read. Verified September 13, 2026.

What was read to state each absence on this page: