Landlord Atlas

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

Verified September 13, 2026 All Iowa topics →

An Iowa lease need not be written and no statute makes the landlord give the tenant a copy, but three things must be told to the tenant: the name and address of the manager and of an owner or someone authorized to act for the owner, in writing at or before the tenancy begins; a full explanation of utility rates, charges and services, before the agreement is signed, unless the tenant pays the utility company directly; and, in writing before the tenancy begins, whether the property is on the federal environmental cleanup listing.

Cited to Iowa Code § 562A.6 (definitions; rental agreement, landlord, reasonable attorney fees) (9), (11) and 23 more cited sources · Verified September 13, 2026

Iowa requires no move-in checklist, no tenant-rights statement, no prescribed lease text and no flood, mold, bed-bug, radon, methamphetamine or asbestos disclosure. Four lease clauses are prohibited in both directions — waiving rights under the act, confessing judgment, paying the other side's attorney fees, and exculpation or indemnity — and a landlord who willfully uses a lease containing provisions known to be prohibited owes actual damages, up to three months' rent and attorney fees. The one state duty with real teeth is not a signing disclosure at all: before renovating a pre-1978 rental the landlord must hand over a lead pamphlet and get a signed acknowledgment, on pain of a civil penalty of up to $5,000 for each offense.

Iowa lease disclosures at a glance

Which law governs Iowa's residential rules are in ch. 562A, the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Law, and that is where almost everything on this page lives: the identity disclosure, the utility explanation and the federal environmental cleanup listing all sit in one disclosure section, and the prohibited-provision roster, the unconscionability backstop, the rules on the landlord's house rules, the deposit rules and the prevailing-party fee provision are all in the same chapter. Two older chapters run alongside it and must not be read as the residential rule: ch. 562, headed Owner-Lessor and Tenant-Lessee, covers apportionment of rent, double rental value, farm-tenancy notices and life-estate terminations, and ch. 570 is the landlord's lien; neither carries a disclosure duty. The statute of frauds is section 622.32 and the electronic-transactions act is ch. 554D. Iowa's only other landlord disclosure duty sits outside landlord-tenant law altogether, in the lead abatement subchapter of ch. 10A and the rules the licensing department makes under it, and it fires on renovation. The sales-side disclosure chapter, ch. 558A, reaches only purchases and does not touch a lease. Manufactured-home communities are governed by ch. 562B and are on their own page.
Who is covered Statewide, with the chapter's eight exclusions, which apply unless the arrangement was created to avoid the chapter: residence at an institution incidental to detention or to medical, geriatric, educational, counseling or religious service; occupancy under a contract of sale where the occupant is the purchaser; occupancy by a member of a fraternal or social organization in its building; transient occupancy in a hotel, motel or similar lodging; occupancy by an employee whose right to occupy is conditional on employment in and about the premises; occupancy by an owner of a condominium unit or a holder of a proprietary lease in a cooperative; premises used by the occupant primarily for agricultural purposes; and housing owned by a nonprofit providing transitional housing for people released from drug or alcohol treatment, and housing for homeless persons. One duty carries its own carve-out: the prohibition on waiving rights or remedies under the chapter does not apply to a rental agreement covering a single-family residence on land assessed as agricultural land and located in an unincorporated area. The lead renovation duty is scoped instead to target housing, meaning pre-1978 housing other than housing for the elderly or for persons with disabilities and housing with no bedroom, unless a child under six lives or is expected to live there.
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 Iowa statute requires a residential rental agreement to be in writing: the act defines a rental agreement as an agreement, written or oral, together with any valid rule adopted under the rules section, and the terms-and-conditions section is permissive. A lease for more than a year must be written and signed to be proved. There is no duty anywhere in Iowa law to give the tenant a copy of the lease — the writing requirements in the disclosure section attach to the identity disclosure, the rent-increase notice and the environmental-listing disclosure, never to a copy. Iowa's own signature mechanic fills the gap: if the landlord does not sign and deliver an agreement the tenant signed and delivered, accepting rent without reservation gives it the same effect as the landlord's signature, and if the tenant does not sign one the landlord signed and delivered, accepting possession without reservation does the same; but an agreement given effect that way is effective for only one year however long its stated term. Iowa sets no language, plain-language or type-size rule for a lease.

Statute of frauds: No evidence of a contract for the creation or transfer of an interest in land is competent unless it is in writing and signed by the party charged or that party's authorized agent, except leases for a term not exceeding one year (section 622.32). A lease for more than a year therefore has to be written and signed to be proved.

Electronic leases and signatures: Iowa's electronic-transactions act (chapter 554D) applies to electronic records and signatures in a transaction, and its only carve-outs are wills, codicils and testamentary trusts and most of the commercial code, so a residential lease and the notices under it are inside the act — Iowa has no carve-out for eviction, default or right-to-cure notices. The act applies only between parties who have each agreed to conduct transactions electronically, which is worked out from the context and the parties' conduct, and that right may not be waived by agreement. The landlord-tenant chapter itself says nothing about electronic mail or electronic signatures; its service rules stand separately.
Owner and agent identity

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

The landlord, or anyone authorized to enter a rental agreement for the landlord, must disclose to the tenant in writing at or before the tenancy begins the name and address of the person authorized to manage the premises, and the name and address of an owner of the premises or a person authorized to act for the owner for service of process and for receiving and receipting for notices and demands (section 562A.13). Name and address only: no telephone number, no email address, no posting alternative, and the statute does not require it to be in the lease. The information must be kept current, and the duty extends to and is enforceable against a successor landlord, owner or manager. No threshold applies. The consequence is agency by operation of law and nothing else: a person who fails to disclose becomes an agent of each person who is a landlord for service of process and receipting, and for performing the landlord's obligations under the chapter and the rental agreement, including expending or making available for that purpose all rent collected from the premises. The act's definition of landlord backs this up by including a manager who fails to disclose. There is no fine, no damages figure and no fee award for a failure. The disclosure also has a direct procedural effect: a tenant may serve the landlord by hand delivery to, or by an acknowledgment signed and dated by, the agent designated under the disclosure section. Iowa has no statewide landlord or rental registration.
Required statements and lease text

No.

Iowa prescribes no tenant-rights statement, summary, handbook, pamphlet or agency form for a landlord to hand over, and no lease text of any kind. The whole landlord-tenant chapter was read and contains nothing of the sort, and there is no Iowa administrative rule chapter on residential landlord-tenant practice at all. The one state-prescribed document that reaches tenants is the lead pamphlet for renovation work, which is in the hazard table because it fires on renovation rather than at signing. Iowa also prescribes no lease contents. The nearest thing is a condition on the landlord's own house rules: a rule binds the tenant only if it is written, promotes the convenience, safety or welfare of tenants, is reasonably related to its purpose, applies to all tenants fairly, is explicit enough to tell the tenant what to do, is not a way of evading the landlord's obligations, and the tenant had notice of it when entering the agreement. A rule adopted later binds only on reasonable notice and only if it does not work a substantial modification of the agreement. Because a valid rule is part of the defined rental agreement, an unnoticed rule is not merely unenforceable — it is not part of the agreement at all.
Move-in condition report

No.

Iowa requires no move-in condition report, inventory, checklist or walk-through. The landlord-tenant chapter has no such section anywhere in its run from the short title to the applicability clause, and the deposit section sets no checklist as a precondition for withholding. Iowa reaches roughly the same place by a different route: the landlord may withhold only such amounts as are reasonably necessary, including to restore the unit to its condition at the commencement of the tenancy with ordinary wear and tear excepted, and in any action about the deposit the burden of proving the reason for withholding, by a preponderance of the evidence, is on the landlord. A landlord who takes no record of the unit's condition at move-in therefore carries that burden without evidence.

Deposit notice at signing: Iowa prescribes no deposit notice at signing. The only deposit notice duty arises on a transfer of the landlord's interest: the successor takes the landlord's rights and obligations, and if the tenant does not object to the stated amount within 20 days after written notice of the amount being transferred or assumed, the successor's duty to return the deposit is limited to the amount in the notice — and the notice must contain a stamped envelope addressed to the successor (section 562A.12). The two-month cap, the account rules, the 30-day return and the bad-faith damages are on the security-deposits page.
Hazard disclosures

One in-force state hazard disclosure: federal environmental cleanup listing (before signing). 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, or asbestos.

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, on an agency document (a statute and an administrative rule). Iowa adds a real state lead duty on top of the federal rules, but it fires on renovation rather than at signing. A person who performs renovation, remodeling or repainting services for target housing or a child-occupied facility for compensation must give an approved lead hazard information pamphlet to the owner and occupant before starting the work. A landlord is caught because the rules define compensation to include payment of rent for rental units, so a landlord renovating a rented unit is doing the work for compensation. Before beginning, and no more than 60 days beforehand, the pamphlet must go to the owner and the adult occupant of each unit where the work will happen — either the state booklet or the federal renovation pamphlet. The person must then obtain a signed, dated acknowledgment from the owner and the known adult occupant confirming receipt and awareness of the health risks, in the wording the rule sets out; the acknowledgment may be a separate sheet or part of the written contract, and must be in the same language as the contract where that is not English. If an adult occupant will not sign, the person must certify in writing that the pamphlet was delivered and that an acknowledgment could not be obtained, giving the address, the date and method of delivery, the deliverer's name and the reason. A certificate of mailing at least seven days before the work is an alternative, and a change in the nature, location or dates of the work requires fresh notice. For work in the common areas of multifamily housing the pamphlet and acknowledgment run to the owner, and every occupant must be notified in writing of the intended work, including how to obtain a pamphlet, with a signed dated statement describing the steps taken. These rules may not be waived. Nothing in Iowa law requires a landlord to say anything about lead at or before lease signing. Threshold: Target housing, meaning housing built before 1978, other than housing for the elderly or for persons with disabilities and housing with no bedroom, unless at least one child under six lives or is expected to live there; and child-occupied facilities. Work disturbing less than one square foot of painted surface, and emergency work, are outside the duty. Document: Lead Poisoning — How to Protect Iowa Families, issued by the Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals, and Licensing (the pamphlet still carries the Iowa Department of Public Health imprint from before the program transferred in 2023). Revision: Update 8/2019, as printed on the back page of the pamphlet. Agency page. A signed acknowledgment is taken. If the duty is not met: A civil penalty of up to $5,000 for each offense (section 10A.903).

Mold — no state duty. Iowa has no mold disclosure duty. The word does not appear in the landlord-tenant chapter or in the sales-disclosure chapter, no chapter of the Iowa Code is about mold in housing, and the single mention of the word in the whole administrative code is a sales-tax rule about mold-making equipment.

Bed bugs — no state duty. Iowa requires no bed-bug disclosure, history or notice. The term appears nowhere in the statutes and nowhere in the administrative code. Infestation is a repair and habitability question in Iowa, not a disclosure.

Radon — no state duty. Iowa requires no radon disclosure to a tenant, and the state's radon statute runs the opposite way. The radon chapter is a certification and confidentiality regime: a person may not disclose to anyone other than the state department the results of a test, or the address or the name of the owner of a nonpublic building tested for radon, unless the owner waives that confidentiality in writing. The one exception is a potential buyer who has made an offer and paid for the testing, and even then only for tests within the previous five years. A prospective tenant appears nowhere in the section, and the rules under it cover only the certification of measurement specialists, laboratories and mitigators.

Methamphetamine — no state duty. Iowa requires no methamphetamine or drug-lab disclosure and does not bar renting an affected property either. The clandestine-laboratory chapter is a public-safety cleanup and cost-recovery statute run by the commissioner of public safety, covering definitions, the commissioner's powers, liability to the state, the state's claim, the immunity of people providing cleanup assistance, legal remedies and rulemaking. It carves an owner who did not know a laboratory existed out of the definition of a person having control over the site, and it contains no notice or disclosure to any occupant or prospective tenant. The administrative code carries no methamphetamine or clandestine-laboratory rule chapter at all.

Asbestos — no state duty. No Iowa statute or rule requires an asbestos disclosure to a tenant. The asbestos removal and encapsulation chapter is a licensing and permitting regime, the rules under it license the work, and the environmental rules charge a fee for notifying the department of a demolition or renovation. Iowa's other asbestos chapters govern tort claims. None of them reaches a lease.

Federal environmental cleanup listing — in force — a state duty, before signing, in writing (a statute). The landlord, or anyone authorized to enter a rental agreement for the landlord, must disclose to each tenant in writing, before the tenancy begins, if the property is listed in the comprehensive environmental response compensation and liability information system maintained by the federal environmental protection agency (section 562A.13). It is the one Iowa disclosure that is not in the uniform act other states copied, which is why summaries built from that template miss it. No form or wording is prescribed and no threshold applies — the duty fires only when the property is actually listed. The section states no consequence for a failure: the agency-by-law consequence elsewhere in the section is keyed to the identity disclosure alone, so a tenant is left with the chapter's general rule that a right or obligation it declares is enforceable by action unless the provision declaring it specifies a different and limited effect.
Flood disclosure

No.

Iowa requires no flood disclosure to a tenant. The word does not appear anywhere in the landlord-tenant chapter, and neither of the two older landlord chapters carries one. The state's sales-side regime does not reach a lease and does not carry a flood item in any event: the real estate disclosure chapter applies only to a transfer or conveyance by sale, exchange, real estate contract or any other method by which real estate and improvements are purchased, where the property has between one and four dwelling units, and it lists nine further exclusions; the contents of the seller's statement are set by real estate commission rules, and the statute itself names structural defects and, since January 1, 2026, the presence of lead service lines. Iowa's flood statutes are about flood and erosion control, soil conservation districts, the flood mitigation program, watershed management, the state flood center and the private flood insurance market, and the flood rules in the administrative code are floodplain development permitting. None of them speaks to a lease.
Disclosures about the property's situation Iowa's one situation-based lease disclosure is the federal environmental cleanup listing, which must be disclosed in writing to each tenant before the tenancy begins where the property is on the federal listing system; it is set out in the hazard table. Nothing else exists. Iowa requires no sex-offender notice from a landlord — the registry chapter puts the duty on the offender and publishes through the state's own internet site, and the word landlord does not appear in it. There is no death-in-the-unit disclosure, no demolition or condominium-conversion notice, no foreclosure notice and no military noise or ordnance notice anywhere in the Iowa Code. On a sale of the building the only tenant-facing duty is the deposit-transfer notice described in the move-in row.
What need not be disclosed None — no statute says a fact about the property need not or may not be disclosed in a rental, or bars a claim over its non-disclosure.
Utility, fee and payment disclosures Iowa's utility rule is an outlier and the wording matters. The landlord, or anyone authorized to enter a rental agreement for the landlord, must fully explain utility rates, charges and services to the prospective tenant before the rental agreement is signed, unless the tenant pays the utility company directly (section 562A.13). Three things follow. First, the duty is to explain, and the section does not require it to be in writing: the writing requirement in that section attaches to the identity disclosure, the rent-increase notice and the environmental-listing disclosure, and not to this one. Second, it is not limited to master-metered buildings and it reaches services as well as rates and charges. Third, its timing peg is the earliest of the three in the section — before the agreement is signed, rather than at or before the tenancy begins. The section states no penalty for a failure. Everything else in this family is absent: Iowa has no fee-itemization or all-fees-in-the-lease rule, no rent-receipt duty, no payment-method or payment-location disclosure, and no rent-concession, renter's-insurance, smoking-policy, rent-reporting, submetering or ratio-billing disclosure. Rent is payable without demand or notice at the time and place the parties agree; unless they agree otherwise it is payable at the dwelling unit, at the beginning of a term of a month or less and otherwise in equal monthly installments at the beginning of each month. Late fees, deposits, the 30-day rent-increase notice and entry notice are on their own pages.
Lease clauses that are void or prohibited

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

Iowa runs a short enumerated roster in one section, and it binds both sides: the opening words prohibit a rental agreement providing that the tenant or the landlord does any of four things, so an attorney-fee or exculpation clause running in either direction is caught. One carve-out sits on the face of the anti-waiver item — it does not apply to a rental agreement covering a single-family residence on land assessed as agricultural land in an unincorporated area. A separate subsection added in 2021 bars a firearms condition of tenancy in federally assisted housing, and a further prohibition sits outside the section altogether, making any waiver of the right to summon emergency assistance void. The chapter's unconscionability provision is the backstop: a court may refuse to enforce the agreement, enforce the rest of it without the unconscionable provision, or limit that provision's application, and the same power reaches an unconscionable settlement in which a party gives up a claim or right, with both parties given a reasonable chance to present evidence of the setting, purpose and effect. Note a numbering trap for anyone reading older cases: the willful-use remedy the Supreme Court cited as subsection 2 in 2016 is subsection 3 today, because the 2021 firearms amendment was inserted ahead of it.

Using a prohibited clause carries a statutory sanction; the statute's own measure follows.

Sanction as the statute states it: A prohibited provision included in a rental agreement is unenforceable. If a landlord willfully uses a rental agreement containing provisions known by the landlord to be prohibited, the tenant may recover actual damages, not more than three months' periodic rent, and reasonable attorney fees (section 562A.11, subsection 3). No attempt to enforce the clause is needed, and there is no cure window. The Iowa Supreme Court has held that known in this provision requires actual knowledge, which may be shown by circumstantial evidence only where the evidence supports the conclusion that a reasonable person simply could not have known otherwise — something the court described as possible in rare cases only, and on that basis it reversed an award of two months' rent.

The listed provisions:

• An agreement that the tenant or the landlord waives or forgoes rights or remedies under the landlord-tenant chapter — except in a rental agreement covering a single-family residence on land assessed as agricultural land and located in an unincorporated area.

• An agreement authorizing a person to confess judgment on a claim arising out of the rental agreement.

• An agreement that the tenant or the landlord pays the other party's attorney fees.

• An agreement to the exculpation or limitation of any liability of the other party arising under law, or to indemnify the other party for that liability or the associated costs.

• Where the landlord receives federal rural rental assistance or federal housing assistance payments under the voucher, new construction, substantial rehabilitation or moderate rehabilitation programs, a provision or rule requiring a person to agree, as a condition of tenancy, to a prohibition or restriction on the lawful ownership, use or possession of a firearm, a firearm component or ammunition within the tenant's own rental unit — reasonable common-area restrictions remain allowed and the tenant must store a firearm with reasonable care (section 562A.11, subsection 2).

• Any waiver of the tenant's right to summon law enforcement or emergency assistance, which is contrary to public policy and void, unenforceable and of no force or effect (section 562A.27B).
Attorney-fee clauses

A lease clause charging either party's attorney fees to the other is void.

Iowa forbids fee-shifting by contract in both directions: the prohibited-provision section binds the tenant or the landlord and voids an agreement that either pays the other party's attorney fees, so a tenant-pays-landlord clause and a landlord-pays-tenant clause fall alike. What replaces the clause is a judicial discretion: a court may, in any action on a rental agreement, award reasonable attorney fees to the prevailing party (section 562A.12), and the act defines reasonable attorney fees as fees determined by the time reasonably expended by the attorney and not by the amount of the recovery. That fee provision sits inside the section on rental deposits, but its words are not limited to deposits and the Iowa Supreme Court has treated it as one of the act's fee provisions and recorded an award made under it in a dispute that was not about a deposit alone. Including a prohibited fee clause is itself actionable where the landlord willfully uses a lease with provisions known to be prohibited.
When, how, and what happens on a failure One section carries three duties on three different pegs. The owner and manager identity goes to the tenant in writing at or before the commencement of the tenancy. The explanation of utility rates, charges and services is owed to the prospective tenant before the rental agreement is signed, and the statute asks only that it be fully explained. The federal environmental cleanup listing must be disclosed in writing to each tenant before the commencement of the tenancy. Outside that section, the landlord's own house rules bind only where the tenant had notice of them when entering the agreement, or, for a later rule, on reasonable notice and without a substantial modification of the agreement; a rent increase needs 30 days' written notice; a deposit transfer needs written notice with a stamped envelope addressed to the successor and carries a 20-day objection window; and the lead pamphlet for renovation work must be given before the work starts, no more than 60 days beforehand, with a signed dated acknowledgment or a written certification that one could not be obtained, or a certificate of mailing at least seven days out. Iowa's remedies are unusually thin. Two of the three duties in the disclosure section state no penalty at all — the utility explanation and the environmental listing — and the third is answered by agency by operation of law rather than by money. The act's general clause says its remedies are administered so the aggrieved party may recover appropriate damages, with a duty to mitigate, and that a right or obligation it declares is enforceable by action unless the provision declaring it specifies a different and limited effect. No state agency has jurisdiction over the chapter, the chapter carries no consumer-protection cross-reference, and no disclosure failure bars an eviction. The money remedies in this topic are the willful-use remedy for a prohibited lease provision and the civil penalty of up to $5,000 for a missing lead renovation pamphlet. Service methods are codified: a landlord may serve a tenant by hand delivery, by a delivery evidenced by an acknowledgment signed and dated by a resident aged 18 or over (which is treated as notice to all tenants of the unit), by personal service under the rules of civil procedure, by both regular and certified mail, by a dated posting on the primary entrance door within the notice period, or by any method that results in actual receipt; the tenant has the mirror set, including service on the agent designated in the identity disclosure.
Can cities add their own rules

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

Nothing in Iowa law preempts a local lease-disclosure or lease-content ordinance, and nothing authorizes one either. Iowa's local-government preemptions run on other subjects and are worth stating so the position is not over-read. A city may not adopt or enforce an ordinance limiting the amount of rent that can be charged for leasing private residential or commercial property, though a city may still manage property in which it holds an interest, and the county powers statute carries the same words. A city may not adopt or enforce an ordinance prohibiting an owner, lessor, sublessor, managing agent or other person entitled to lease out a dwelling unit from refusing to rent because of the person's use of a federal housing choice voucher, and any such ordinance in effect on January 1, 2021 became void and unenforceable on and after January 1, 2023; again the county twin matches. Neither a city nor a county may require registration or licensing, charge fees, or set safety or sanitary standards for rental manufactured or mobile homes unless a similar system applies to other rental properties intended for human habitation. And a local ordinance, rule or regulation may not authorize imposing a penalty on a resident, owner, tenant or landlord because they were the victim of abuse or crime or sought law-enforcement or emergency assistance for such a victim — prohibited penalties include fines, eviction and the actual or threatened revocation, suspension or non-renewal of a rental certificate, license or permit. No Iowa city carries an anchored lease-packet sentence on this page.
How state law refers to the federal rules Iowa's renovation lead regime builds on the federal one without restating it. The rules let the person doing the work satisfy the state duty by handing over either the state booklet or the federal renovation pamphlet, and the state booklet itself reprints the federal lessor and lessee disclosure and certification form at the back, including the agent's certification of having informed the lessor of the lessor's federal obligations. Iowa's own add-on is the rest of the package: the notification duty before renovation, the prescribed acknowledgment wording, the written certification where an occupant will not sign, the written notice to every occupant for work in common areas, and the civil penalty of up to $5,000 for each offense. Separately, the firearms limb of the prohibited-clause roster takes its scope from federal programs, applying where the landlord receives federal rural rental assistance or federal housing assistance payments under the voucher, new construction, substantial rehabilitation or moderate rehabilitation programs.
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

De Stefano v. Apts. Downtown, Inc., 879 N.W.2d 155 (Iowa 2016) (Supreme Court of Iowa; residential setting; bears on void or prohibited lease clauses): Reading the anti-waiver item of the prohibited-provision roster, the court held that a lease provision by which a party agrees to waive or forgo rights or remedies under the act is prohibited, and that the provision exists so that heavily lawyered form leases cannot override the act's substantive provisions; it struck down clauses shifting the cost of repairs needed to keep the premises fit and habitable and an automatic carpet-cleaning deduction. The court also treated the prevailing-party fee provision in the deposits section as one of the act's fee provisions rather than a deposit-only rule.

Caruso v. Apts. Downtown, Inc., 880 N.W.2d 465 (Iowa 2016) (Supreme Court of Iowa; residential setting; bears on void or prohibited lease clauses): On the remedy for willfully using a lease with provisions known to be prohibited, the court held that known requires actual knowledge, which may be proved directly or by circumstantial evidence, but that circumstantial proof must be strong enough to conclude that a reasonable person simply could not have known otherwise — possible, the court said, in rare cases only. It reversed an award of two months' rent for insufficient evidence of a knowing violation.

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

Iowa hazard disclosures at a glance

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

Hazard Status When Form Prescribed document
Lead (state add-on to the federal rule) Event-driven notice only — Agency document Lead Poisoning — How to Protect Iowa Families — Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals, and Licensing (the pamphlet still carries the Iowa Department of Public Health imprint from before the program transferred in 2023)
Mold None — — —
Bed bugs None — — —
Radon None — — —
Methamphetamine None — — —
Asbestos None — — —
Federal environmental cleanup listing In force Before signing In writing —

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: Iowa 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 Iowa require a landlord to give the tenant a written statement of tenant rights?
No. Iowa prescribes no tenant-rights statement, summary, handbook, pamphlet or agency form for a landlord to hand over, and no lease text of any kind. The whole landlord-tenant chapter was read and contains nothing of the sort, and there is no Iowa administrative rule chapter on residential landlord-tenant practice at all.
Does an Iowa 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 a separate writing. The landlord, or anyone authorized to enter a rental agreement for the landlord, must disclose to the tenant in writing at or before the tenancy begins the name and address of the person authorized to manage the premises, and the name and address of an owner of the premises or a person authorized to act for the owner for service of process and for receiving and receipting for notices and demands (section 562A.13).
Is a move-in inspection checklist required in Iowa?
No. Iowa requires no move-in condition report, inventory, checklist or walk-through. The landlord-tenant chapter has no such section anywhere in its run from the short title to the applicability clause, and the deposit section sets no checklist as a precondition for withholding.
What hazards must an Iowa landlord disclose to a tenant?
One in-force state hazard disclosure: federal environmental cleanup listing (before signing). 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, or asbestos.
Does Iowa require flood disclosure to renters?
No. Iowa requires no flood disclosure to a tenant. The word does not appear anywhere in the landlord-tenant chapter, and neither of the two older landlord chapters carries one.
Does Iowa void or prohibit specific lease clauses?
Yes — the statute lists the lease provisions that are void or prohibited. Iowa runs a short enumerated roster in one section, and it binds both sides: the opening words prohibit a rental agreement providing that the tenant or the landlord does any of four things, so an attorney-fee or exculpation clause running in either direction is caught.

Citations

How this record was verified: Statutory text read directly from the Iowa General Assembly's own chapter files, each carrying in its footer the compile stamp that serves as the currency banner — for the landlord-tenant chapter, Tue Dec 09 22:01:02 2025, Iowa Code 2026, Chapter 562A. Chapter 562A was read in full, section by section from its own table of contents, and chs. 562, 570, 558A, 10A, 124C, 88B, 135, 136B, 364, 331, 622, 554D, 692A and 455I were each read for the provisions this page relies on. Because the Iowa Code 2026 was compiled on December 9, 2025 and the 2026 session convened on January 12, 2026, an enactment check was mandatory: the Legislative Services Agency's per-section Code and Acts Sections Amended ledger was parsed for four sessions — 1,762 section rows drawn from 204 bills for the 2026 session, and 1,606, 2,876 and 5,220 rows for the three before it — with each row's disposition taken from its own governor's-action column, and every in-scope hit read from the enrolled act. Zero rows touch the landlord-tenant chapter. Since Iowa publishes no full-text search of its code, the statewide negative was built by enumerating all 1,870 chapters of the Iowa Code 2026 with their titles from the sixteen title indexes and filtering every title for the hazard, flood, disclosure and landlord terms, then reading every hit chapter. The Iowa Administrative Code was covered the same way at the 09/02/2026 Official Edition: all 77 per-agency Analysis files, which list every chapter and rule heading in the code, were opened and filtered, with the material chapters 481—469, 641—68 and 641—43 then read in full. The pending universe came from the complete bill lists for both sessions of the 91st General Assembly (1,897 and 1,260 rows), filtered for landlord, tenant, rental agreement, lease and renter, with each in-topic hit's lifecycle taken from its own dated action history. The state lead pamphlet and the common-area notification forms were read on the licensing department's own host, the pamphlet carrying a printed revision date. De Stefano v. Apts. Downtown, Inc., 879 N.W.2d 155 (Iowa 2016), and Caruso v. Apts. Downtown, Inc., 880 N.W.2d 465 (Iowa 2016), were cite-verified and read in full, and their subsequent history was checked on the Iowa Judicial Branch's own opinion search, which shows both followed and neither questioned. The 91st General Assembly adjourned sine die on May 3, 2026, ending the biennium with no carryover. Verified September 13, 2026.

What was read to state each absence on this page: