Landlord Atlas

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

Verified September 13, 2026 All Idaho topics →

Idaho prescribes no document and no tenant-rights statement, and the one thing the lease itself must carry is every fee, fine, assessment, interest or other cost the landlord intends to charge.

Cited to Idaho Code § 6-320 (a)(6), (d), (e) and 15 more cited sources · Verified September 13, 2026

There is no tenant-rights document, no move-in condition report, no owner identity notice and no lead, mold, radon, bed-bug, methamphetamine, asbestos or flood disclosure of any kind, on either the statute books or the state rules. The one lease-content rule works in reverse: every fee, fine, assessment, interest or other cost the landlord means to charge has to appear in the written rental agreement, and a charge the agreement omits cannot be collected unless the tenancy is oral or the landlord gives thirty days' written notice of the change. All fees, including late fees, must be reasonable, and the rule binds agreements entered into or renewed since July 1, 2023. Idaho voids no lease clause and has no general anti-waiver rule, so the common law of contract governs what a lease may say. Attorney fees go to the prevailing party by statute in eviction and tenant-remedy cases, whatever the lease provides, but a landlord loses them if the three-day notice failed to warn the tenant that fees would be awarded.

Idaho lease disclosures at a glance

Which law governs Idaho has no residential landlord-tenant act, and its rules are split between two chapters, which is the trap that produces false reports that Idaho has no law at all. The substantive tenancy duties sit in Title 6, chapter 3, the forcible entry and unlawful detainer chapter: the landlord's habitability list and the tenant's action to enforce it, the security-deposit rules and the attorney-fee statute. The rental-market rules sit in Title 55, chapter 3: the notice required to change terms or raise rent, the limitation on fees, and the preemption of local rent, fee and deposit ordinances. The statute of frauds is section 9-505, electronic transactions are in Title 28, chapter 50, and the seller's property-condition regime is Title 55, chapter 25, which reaches a lease only where the lease carries an option to purchase. Two of the Title 55 section numbers changed in 2025, and the old numbers were reused for different sections, so citations published before mid-2025 point at live but different law.
Who is covered Statewide, with no unit-count threshold, no owner-occupancy carve-out and no local opt-in. Three scope facts matter instead. The limitation on fees binds only rental agreements entered into or renewed on or after July 1, 2023, so a tenancy that began earlier and has never renewed is outside it. The same section's requirement that a charge appear in the agreement does not reach an oral agreement at all. And the tenant's action to enforce the landlord's duties does not apply to tracts of land of five acres or more used for agricultural purposes. The seller's disclosure act, which does not reach an ordinary lease, is separately confined to property of one to four dwelling units.
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 Idaho statute requires a residential rental agreement to be in writing; the fee statute expressly contemplates an oral agreement. A lease for longer than one year must be written and subscribed to be enforceable. Nothing requires the landlord to give the tenant a copy of the signed lease, and there is no substitute duty through a broker either, because Idaho does not license leasing or property management at all. There is no language or translation duty, no plain-language act and no type-size or placement rule for a lease. The one Idaho rule about the words on a page governs the three-day eviction notice, not the lease: unless that notice tells the tenant that attorney fees will be awarded to the prevailing party, the fees cannot be awarded.

Statute of frauds: An agreement for the leasing of real property for a longer period than one year is invalid unless the agreement, or a note or memorandum of it, is in writing and subscribed by the party charged or that party's agent (section 9-505, subsection 4). There is a second writing requirement most summaries miss: where an agent signs for the party to be charged, the agent's authority must itself be in writing and subscribed by that party, or the agreement is invalid.

Electronic leases and signatures: Idaho's electronic transactions act (Title 28, chapter 50) applies to electronic records and signatures relating to a transaction, and excludes only wills, codicils and testamentary trusts and most of the commercial code. There is no landlord-tenant carve-out and no notice carve-out, so a lease may be signed and delivered electronically. Neither landlord-tenant chapter says anything about email or electronic delivery: the thirty-day notice of a change in a fee must be written but no medium is prescribed, and the only service rule in the chapters governs the tenant's notice to the landlord before suit, which goes by personal delivery, to an employee at the landlord's usual place of business, or by certified mail with return receipt requested.
Owner and agent identity

No.

Idaho requires no disclosure of the owner's or the manager's identity or address, in the lease or anywhere else, and it is a true zero rather than a duty that fires on request or an agency rule that fills the gap. There is no agent-for-service designation, no rule making anyone the owner's agent by default, and no landlord or rental registration, statewide or local: the word landlord does not appear anywhere in the municipal corporations title. The only provision about reaching the landlord runs the other way, telling the tenant how to serve the notice that must precede a tenant's suit: personally on the landlord or the landlord's agent, or on an employee at the usual place of business if they are absent, or by certified mail with return receipt requested. It assumes the tenant already knows who and where the landlord is, and imposes no duty to say. The real-estate agency brochure some summaries point to does not help: it runs to a prospective buyer or seller in a transaction that requires a license, and Idaho's license requirement covers selling, listing, buying and negotiating the purchase, sale, option or exchange of real estate, not leasing.
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.

Idaho prescribes nothing here: no tenant-rights statement, no summary of the law, no handbook, no agency form, no model lease and no notice telling the tenant where the law can be read. No statute directs any agency to publish such a document, and none exists. The only state-prescribed form in the property law is the seller's property-condition form, which the statute sets out word for word and which by its own opening line applies to sellers of residential real property. There is no prescribed lease wording of any kind. What Idaho does have is one lease-content rule, and it works by negative space rather than by recital: it does not say what the lease must state, it says that a charge the lease does not contain cannot be charged.

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

• Every fee, fine, assessment, interest or other cost the landlord intends to charge must appear in the written rental agreement, and it may not be charged in an amount greater than the agreement states; a charge the agreement omits cannot be collected at all unless the agreement is oral or the landlord first gives thirty days' written notice of the change (section 55-305, subsection 2). The rule applies to agreements entered into or renewed on or after July 1, 2023.
Move-in condition report

No.

Idaho requires no move-in condition report, checklist, inventory or walk-through, no offer of one, and no right to see what the previous tenant was charged for damage. Both landlord-tenant chapters and the state's rules were read for it and there is nothing. The asymmetry is worth knowing before a dispute: the deposit statute forbids keeping any part of a deposit to cover normal wear and tear, and defines that phrase, and it requires a signed statement itemizing the amounts kept, the purpose of each and a detailed list of what was spent whenever a refund is less than the full deposit. All of that happens at the end of the tenancy, and no document records the condition at the start against which wear and tear is measured, so a landlord who wants that record has to create one voluntarily.

Deposit notice at signing: No signing-time deposit notice exists. The only writing duty in the deposit statute is the signed itemized statement that must accompany any partial refund, and a third-party manager must hold deposits in a separate federally insured account (section 6-321, subsections 2 and 4). The clocks, the new owner's liability on a sale and the rest are on the security-deposits page.
Hazard disclosures

No in-force state hazard disclosure duty applies at signing beyond the federal lead-paint rule. No state duty exists for lead, 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) — no state duty. Idaho adds nothing to the federal lead-paint rule. There is no state lead statute at all: the words lead-based and lead paint appear nowhere in the health and safety title, in either landlord-tenant chapter or in the state rules that were read, except in one child-care facility licensing standard that asks a licensee to document testing in buildings built before 1990. No state form, registration, certificate, inspection or renewal re-disclosure exists, and no Idaho statute refers to the federal rule, so an Idaho landlord's lead obligations at signing are the federal ones and nothing more.

Mold — no state duty. Idaho has no mold law of any kind. The word does not appear in the health and safety title, in either landlord-tenant chapter or in the sales-disclosure chapter, and the only occurrences in the state rules are in the air-quality rules, where they describe plastic molding, foundry sand molds and material that must not smolder. There is no disclosure duty, no remediation standard and no testing requirement; mold in an occupied unit is handled through the landlord's ordinary repair duties, which are on the habitability page.

Bed bugs — no state duty. Idaho has no bed-bug law. Neither the statutes nor the state rules mention bed bugs anywhere, so there is no disclosure about an infestation in the unit or in an adjacent one, no duty to say when the unit was last inspected, and no notice fired by an infestation during the tenancy. An infestation is a repair and habitability question.

Radon — no state duty. Idaho requires no radon disclosure to a tenant, requires no testing and does not license radon measurement or mitigation contractors. Radon appears nowhere in the health and safety title. In the state rules it appears in two unrelated places: a child-care licensing standard that asks for documentation of radon testing at initial licensing, and the drinking-water treatment rules, which deal with carbon used for radon removal and with radioactive decay. None of that reaches a residential tenancy.

Methamphetamine — no state duty. Idaho is the outlier among its neighbors: it has no clandestine drug lab act, no contaminated-property remediation law, no disclosure duty about methamphetamine and not even a rule requiring a contaminated unit to be cleaned before it is re-rented. The words methamphetamine, clandestine and drug lab appear nowhere in the health and safety title, in either landlord-tenant chapter or in the state rules that were read. The only contaminated-land program in the state is a construction-permit scheme for one federal superfund site, and it imposes no duty on a landlord toward a tenant.

Asbestos — no state duty. No Idaho statute or rule requires an asbestos disclosure to a tenant. Asbestos appears in the health and safety title only in the solid-waste definitions, which exclude asbestos waste from demolition waste, and in the state rules only in abatement, air-quality, solid-waste and licensing provisions aimed at contractors and facilities.

Other hazard notices (pesticide, ordnance, pool, contaminated site, detectors) — no state duty. Idaho requires no other hazard notice at signing: no pesticide-application notice, no military ordnance or noise-zone notice, no pool-safety notice, no pest-control disclosure and no notice about a contaminated site. The state's one smoke-detector provision is an act rather than a notice: on the commencement of a rental agreement the landlord must verify that smoke detectors have been installed and are in good working order, and the tenant must keep them working during the tenancy. Nothing has to be written down, acknowledged or signed, and detectors a tenant buys under the repair remedy become the landlord's property and may not be removed. That belongs to the habitability page.
Flood disclosure

No.

Idaho requires no flood disclosure to a tenant, and the word does not appear in either landlord-tenant chapter. The sales side has a property-condition form, and the sentence that makes people think it covers rentals is the one that does not: the act applies to any person who intends to transfer residential real property, including nonowner occupied rental property, and then lists the covered methods, every one of which is a transfer of ownership or an option on it, namely a sale, an exchange, an installment sale contract, a lease with an option to purchase, any other option to purchase, or a ground lease coupled with improvements. The phrase describes rental property that is being sold. The form is set out word for word in the statute, so there is no agency version and no revision to watch; it is delivered within ten days of the seller accepting the buyer's offer, and the buyer signs and returns a copy. A lease with an option to purchase is inside the act, which is a sales-side point rather than a tenancy duty. The flood references in the health and safety title are landfill siting, water quality and emergency provisions, and the municipal title's are urban renewal and local improvement districts.
Disclosures about the property's situation No statutory disclosure of this kind
What need not be disclosed

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

Idaho law runs the opposite way from a disclosure duty here. No cause of action arises against an owner of real property, or the owner's representative, for failing to disclose to the transferee of the property that the property was psychologically impacted. That term covers three things: that an occupant or prior occupant is or was suspected of being infected with, or has been infected with, a disease that medical evidence shows is highly unlikely to be transmitted through occupancy of a dwelling; that the property was at any time suspected of being the site of a suicide, homicide or felony that had no effect on the physical condition of the property or its surroundings; and that a registered or suspected sex offender occupied or resides near the property. A separate route lets a purchaser who is making a bona fide offer put the question in writing, in which case the owner's representative must ask the owner and, with the owner's consent, report any findings, and must tell the purchaser in writing if the owner refuses. That inquiry route is written for purchasers only. The immunity itself is written more broadly, in terms of an owner of real property and a transferee, and the chapter defines neither term nor limits the immunity to sales; the only Idaho decision applying it involved a purchase, not a tenancy.
Utility, fee and payment disclosures Idaho has one rule here and it is the whole of the state's lease-content law. An owner may not charge a residential tenant a fee, fine, assessment, interest or other cost in an amount greater than the rental agreement states, or one that is not included in the rental agreement at all. Two exceptions sit inside that: the rule about charges not in the agreement does not apply where the rental agreement is oral, and where it is written the owner may add or change a charge by giving the tenant thirty days' written notice of the change. Every fee imposed on a residential tenant, including a fee for the late payment of rent, must be reasonable, and nothing in the section limits what may be charged for rent itself. It binds rental agreements entered into or renewed on or after July 1, 2023. The section states no penalty of any kind: its force is simply that a charge the lease does not carry cannot be collected. Everything else in this family is absent. There is no shared-meter, submetering or ratio-billing disclosure, no rent-receipt duty, no rule about where or how rent may be paid, and no rent-concession, renter's-insurance, smoking-policy or rent-reporting disclosure. Two neighboring notice rules belong to other pages: a landlord must give at least thirty days' written notice of any rent increase or of an intention not to renew, and in a month-to-month tenancy fifteen days before the end of the month a landlord may give notice that itself becomes part of the lease if the tenant stays on. Late fees, deposits and application fees are on their own pages; Idaho has no application-fee statute at all.
Lease clauses that are void or prohibited

No statute voids or prohibits any residential lease clause.

Idaho voids nothing. There is no list of prohibited lease provisions, no general rule against waiving statutory rights, no unconscionability provision, no ban on exculpatory clauses and no ban on a confession of judgment; unlike its neighbors Utah and Wyoming, Idaho does not even say that the parties may allocate the statutory duties between themselves. Nothing in either landlord-tenant chapter is worded as a waiver or prohibited-provision rule. What governs a residential lease term is therefore the ordinary common law of contract, including the doctrines a court applies to any agreement, rather than any statutory roster. That also means the one lease-content rule Idaho has, requiring every chargeable fee to appear in the agreement, carries no anti-waiver clause to make it non-negotiable.
Attorney-fee clauses

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

In any action brought under the forcible entry and unlawful detainer chapter, except where treble damages are awarded, the prevailing party is entitled to an award of attorney fees. The award comes from the statute rather than from any lease clause, and it runs to whichever side wins, so a one-way clause in the landlord's favor adds nothing; nor is such a clause prohibited. Its reach is the chapter, not every lease dispute: it covers forcible entry and detainer, unlawful detainer, the remedy for removing unauthorized occupants, the tenant's action to enforce the landlord's duties and the deposit action, and a straight contract suit on a lease covenant outside that chapter is not in it. Two conditions matter. Where treble damages are awarded, the fee award is displaced. And in a case that requires the three days' notice, fees may be awarded only if that notice itself advised the tenant that attorney fees would be awarded to the prevailing party, so a landlord who serves a notice without the warning loses the fees. The Supreme Court has awarded fees under the section in a tenant-initiated action, confirming that it runs both ways.
When, how, and what happens on a failure Idaho has no landlord disclosure duty to time. There is no document to hand over, no statement to attach, no acknowledgment to collect and nothing that recurs annually or on renewal. Three things do have timing. Every chargeable fee must be in the written rental agreement when it is signed or renewed, and a change to a charge takes thirty days' written notice. At the commencement of the tenancy the landlord must verify that smoke detectors are installed and working, which is an act rather than a notice. And at the end of the tenancy a partial refund of the deposit must be accompanied by a signed statement itemizing what was kept, why, and what was spent. The remedies for this topic is that no penalty is stated. Nothing attaches damages, a multiplier, agency enforcement, a trade-practices claim, a bar on eviction or a fee award to the fee-inclusion rule, and there is no anti-waiver provision behind it; its whole force is that an unlisted charge is not chargeable. The one Idaho rule that penalizes a missing disclosure penalizes the landlord's own notice: fees are lost in an eviction if the three-day notice failed to warn the tenant that fees would go to the prevailing party.
Can cities add their own rules

State law says nothing either way about local lease-disclosure or lease-content rules.

Idaho's preemption is subject-specific and recent. Since 2025 a local governmental unit may not enact, maintain or enforce an ordinance or resolution that would have the effect of forcing Idaho property owners to participate in an optional federal housing assistance program, or any other program or law that would otherwise regulate rent, fees or deposits charged for leasing private residential property. Two things are preempted: a mandate to take part in an optional federal housing assistance program, which is aimed at source-of-income ordinances, and local regulation of rent, fees or deposits. Lease-disclosure and lease-content ordinances are not mentioned, so they are neither preempted nor authorized, though the boundary does real work: a local ordinance requiring fees to be disclosed could well be read as regulating fees. The section does not limit a local government acting as the owner of residential property in which it holds a property interest. Nothing else in the municipal corporations title touches private landlords: the word landlord does not appear in it at all, and its tenancy language is confined to municipal housing authorities and urban renewal, where the city is itself the landlord. No Idaho city carries a lease packet or signing-time disclosure 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 No signed act is waiting beyond any not-yet-in-force duty already stated on this page
Leading court decisions

Sankey v. Ivey, No. 49512 (Idaho, Aug. 30, 2023) (Idaho Supreme Court; residential setting; bears on attorney-fee clauses): In a tenant's action against the owners and managers of a rental property, both sides sought attorney fees under the landlord-tenant fee statute and the court awarded them to the prevailing owners and managers, applying the general commercial-transaction fee statute alongside it. The decision confirms that the fee statute's prevailing-party award is available in a tenant-initiated action and runs to whichever side wins; the condition attached to a three-day notice was not in issue.

White v. Mock, 140 Idaho 882, 104 P.3d 356 (Idaho Supreme Court; 2004; a general statement of law; bears on what need not be disclosed): Buyers of a home sued over undisclosed water intrusion and mold. The court applied the psychologically impacted property statute to bar stigma damages, alongside the rescission right the property-condition disclosure act gives a purchaser. The case arose from a purchase rather than a tenancy, and no Idaho decision has applied the no-duty rule to a lease, so its reach beyond a sale is untested.

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

Idaho 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) None — — —
Mold None — — —
Bed bugs None — — —
Radon None — — —
Methamphetamine None — — —
Asbestos None — — —
Other hazard notices (pesticide, ordnance, pool, contaminated site, detectors) 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: Idaho 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 Idaho 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. Idaho prescribes nothing here: no tenant-rights statement, no summary of the law, no handbook, no agency form, no model lease and no notice telling the tenant where the law can be read.
Does an Idaho landlord have to disclose the owner's name and address?
No. Idaho requires no disclosure of the owner's or the manager's identity or address, in the lease or anywhere else, and it is a true zero rather than a duty that fires on request or an agency rule that fills the gap. There is no agent-for-service designation, no rule making anyone the owner's agent by default, and no landlord or rental registration, statewide or local: the word landlord does not appear anywhere in the municipal corporations title.
Is a move-in inspection checklist required in Idaho?
No. Idaho requires no move-in condition report, checklist, inventory or walk-through, no offer of one, and no right to see what the previous tenant was charged for damage. Both landlord-tenant chapters and the state's rules were read for it and there is nothing.
What hazards must an Idaho landlord disclose to a tenant?
No in-force state hazard disclosure duty applies at signing beyond the federal lead-paint rule. No state duty exists for lead, mold, bed bugs, radon, methamphetamine, asbestos, or any other hazard.
Does Idaho require flood disclosure to renters?
No. Idaho requires no flood disclosure to a tenant, and the word does not appear in either landlord-tenant chapter. The sales side has a property-condition form, and the sentence that makes people think it covers rentals is the one that does not: the act applies to any person who intends to transfer residential real property, including nonowner occupied rental property, and then lists the covered methods, every one of which is a transfer of ownership or an option on it, namely a sale, an exchange, an installment sale contract, a lease with an option to purchase, any other option to purchase, or a ground lease coupled with improvements.
Does Idaho void or prohibit specific lease clauses?
No statute voids or prohibits any residential lease clause. Idaho voids nothing.

Citations

How this record was verified: Direct reading of the Idaho Code on the Legislature's own site. Because Idaho has no landlord-tenant act, the reading covered both chapters that carry residential rules: Title 6, chapter 3 (forcible entry and unlawful detainer), all 28 sections, and Title 55, chapter 3, all 15 sections, each read in full from the chapter file and then re-confirmed section by section on the Legislature's own section pages, because the Title 6 chapter file is stamped September 15, 2025 and is demonstrably behind the section pages, which carry a 2026 amendment it lacks. Title 55 chapter 25 (the Property Condition Disclosure Act, 18 sections, scope clause quoted), chapter 28 (psychologically impacted property, 3 sections), Title 54 chapter 20 (the real-estate license law, for the licensee question), section 9-505 (statute of frauds) and Title 28 chapter 50 (electronic transactions) were read in full. The statewide negatives rest on full texts rather than indexes: every one of the 84 chapters the Title 39 index lists (health and safety) and all 27 chapters of Title 50 (municipal corporations) were read and searched, with every non-zero hit read in context. The administrative leg was run despite an outage on the rules site, whose own banner has said since September 3, 2026 that document search and listings are unavailable: the rule text itself is served by the Administrative Rules Coordinator's file host, and 175 checks across IDAPA title 16 (health and welfare, subtitles 01 to 07, chapters 01 to 25) and title 58 (environmental quality, subtitle 01, chapters 01 to 27) located 38 existing chapters, all of which were read and searched. Administrative currency comes from the Rules Coordinator's own abridged index, which prints Idaho Administrative Bulletin, September 2, 2026, volume 26-9, covering active rulemakings from April 2 to September 2, 2026. Currency of the statutes was established from the official Session Laws, volume 2, whose code index is a per-section table of amendments, repeals, additions and references and is therefore gap-free by construction: the 2026 and 2025 volumes were read through their complete Title 6, Title 39 and Title 55 blocks, and cross-checked against the 2026 bill index's own landlords and tenants heading. The 2026 session adjourned sine die on April 2, 2026 with no carryover. Two decisions were read in full in the central case step, White v. Mock and Sankey v. Ivey. Verified September 13, 2026.

What was read to state each absence on this page: