What must a Missouri landlord disclose to a tenant, and what must the lease say?
A Missouri landlord must tell the tenant in writing, at or before the tenancy begins, who manages the property and who may be served with notices and legal papers, and must disclose in writing to a prospective tenant that the premises were used to produce methamphetamine, or that they are or were contaminated with radioactive or other hazardous material, whenever the landlord knows it.
Cited to § 441.005 RSMo (2), (4) and 24 more cited sources · Verified September 13, 2026
That is the whole of the state's lease-disclosure law. Missouri requires no written lease, no copy of the signed lease, no tenant-rights document, no move-in checklist, no deposit notice at signing, and no flood, lead, radon, mold, bed-bug or asbestos disclosure — it has no radon, mold or bed-bug statute at all, and no seller disclosure form either. The one required lease content is conditional: a landlord who means to charge for carpet cleaning must say so in the agreement. Since August 28, 2026 a buyer in a sale leaseback, where a homeowner sells and stays on as a tenant, must give a boldface single-page warning fourteen days before signing, backed by a civil penalty of up to ten thousand dollars and a private action.
Missouri lease disclosures at a glance
| Which law governs | Missouri has no residential landlord-tenant act of the modern kind, and the duties on this page sit in three separate chapters. Chapter 441 is the general landlord and tenant chapter: it defines a lease as a written or oral agreement, and it carries the methamphetamine disclosure at section 441.236 and the local-preemption section at 441.043. Chapter 535 carries the landlord-tenant court procedures and two things that matter here: the owner and manager identity disclosure at section 535.185 and the security-deposit section at 535.300, which is where Missouri's only required lease content lives. Chapter 442, the titles and conveyances chapter, carries the radioactive and hazardous-contamination disclosure at section 442.055, the psychologically impacted property rule at 442.600, the sales-side methamphetamine disclosure at 442.606, and, since August 28, 2026, the Missouri Residential Sale Leaseback Protection Act at section 442.920. The statute of frauds is section 432.010, the rule making an unwritten lease a tenancy at will is section 432.050, and the electronic-transactions act is sections 432.200 to 432.295. |
|---|---|
| Who is covered | Statewide, with no unit count, building age or owner-type threshold on any landlord disclosure. Two scope points are worth knowing. The chapter 441 definitions, which govern chapters 441, 534 and 535 alike, bring manufactured homes, mobile trailer homes and vehicles used or intended to be used primarily as a dwelling inside the word premises. And the sale-leaseback disclosure is narrower than the rest: it reaches residential real estate with one to four dwelling units that is or was the seller's own residence, and only where the seller is a natural person. |
| 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 Missouri statute requires a residential lease to be in writing, and none requires the landlord to give the tenant a copy of one. The general landlord chapter is deliberately form-neutral: it defines a lease as a written or oral agreement for the use or possession of premises. An oral letting of more than a year is not void, but it cannot be sued on, and an unwritten lease takes effect as a tenancy at will. Nothing requires the lease or any notice in a language other than English, and Missouri prescribes no plain-language act, no type size and no placement rule for a residential lease. The one format-adjacent requirement in Missouri law is a lease-content rule in the deposit section about carpet cleaning, and the one typography rule anywhere in this topic belongs to the sale-leaseback disclosure, which must be a single page in boldface type. Statute of frauds: No action may be brought on a lease of land for a longer time than one year unless the agreement, or a memorandum or note of it, is in writing and signed by the party to be charged (section 432.010). A lease made by word of mouth and not put in writing and signed has the force and effect of an estate at will only (section 432.050), and an assignment of a lease must itself be written (section 432.060). Electronic leases and signatures: Missouri's electronic-transactions act (sections 432.200 to 432.295) applies to electronic records and signatures relating to a transaction, and excludes only wills, codicils and testamentary trusts and most of the commercial code. A residential lease is not carved out. The act says a record or signature may not be denied legal effect merely because it is electronic, that an electronic record satisfies a law requiring a writing, and that an electronic signature satisfies a law requiring a signature — which covers every written disclosure on this page. The landlord chapter itself says nothing about electronic delivery at all. |
| 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 tenancy begins, the landlord of residential property, or anyone authorized to make a rental agreement for the landlord, must disclose to the tenant in writing the name and address of two people: the person authorized to manage the premises, and 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. Any writing satisfies it; the statute does not require the lease, does not allow a posting instead, and does not ask for a telephone number. If the owner or the authorized person gives a post office box, service and any notice or demand may be made by first-class mail with two copies, under the general service statute. The information must be kept current, and the section is enforceable against any successor landlord, owner or manager. The consequence of not disclosing is sharp and structural: the person who fails to comply becomes the agent of each person who is a landlord, both for service of process and notices, and for performing the landlord's obligations under the landlord chapters or the rental agreement, and for collecting the rent due. There is no damages figure, no bar on bringing an eviction, and no public enforcer. Missouri has no statewide landlord or rental registration; the one local-specific statute in this area requires landowners in the City of St. Louis to have an agent for service on housing-code violations, which is not a tenant disclosure. Separately, a buyer of the property must tell tenants in writing that title has been transferred, by what means and on what date, attaching the notice to a recorded copy of the deed, or in first-class counties to a notarized affidavit signed by both the prior owner and the successor; a successor who does not give that notice cannot recover the rent. |
| 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. Missouri requires no tenant-rights statement, no summary of the landlord-tenant law, no handbook, no model lease and no agency form that a landlord must hand over or attach, and it directs no agency to publish one. Nor does it prescribe wording that every lease must carry. The state's only required lease content is conditional and belongs to the deposit rules: a landlord who means to charge for carpet cleaning must say so in the rental agreement. Missouri does prescribe one block of statutory wording in this topic, and it is transaction-specific rather than general: in a sale leaseback, where a homeowner sells and stays on as a tenant, the buyer must give the seller a single-page boldface disclosure in words the statute sets out. That duty is described with the location disclosures. The identity disclosure may be made in any writing, so it is not lease text either. Lease contents the statutes or rules address, each in the circumstance it names: • Where the landlord intends to charge the tenant for carpet cleaning beyond ordinary wear and tear, the rental agreement must include a provision telling the tenant that he or she may be liable for the actual costs of carpet cleaning that exceed ordinary wear and tear and that those costs may be withheld from the security deposit (section 535.300, subsection 4, paragraph 2). Without the provision the landlord may not withhold for it, and the landlord must also give the tenant an actual-cost receipt within thirty days of the end of the tenancy. |
| Move-in condition report | No. Missouri requires no move-in condition statement, inventory, checklist or walk-through, and no documentation of the unit's condition is a precondition to keeping any part of the deposit. The deposit section lets the landlord withhold to restore the unit to its condition at the commencement of the tenancy, ordinary wear and tear excepted, and asks for no record of what that condition was. The inspection Missouri does require comes at the other end of the tenancy and belongs to the deposit rules: the landlord must give the tenant or the tenant's representative reasonable written notice, at the last known address or in person, of the date and time the landlord will inspect the unit after the rental agreement ends, and the tenant has the right to be present. No number of days is fixed and no penalty is stated for that notice. Deposit notice at signing: Missouri prescribes no deposit notice at signing — no receipt, no statement of where the money is held and no terms-and-conditions writing. Every deposit writing comes at the end: the return or itemized list within thirty days of termination, the move-out inspection notice, and the carpet-cleaning receipt within thirty days (section 535.300). The two-month cap, the holding rules and the double-damages remedy are on the deposits page. |
| Hazard disclosures | Two in-force state hazard disclosures: methamphetamine (before signing) and radioactive or hazardous-material contamination (before signing). No state duty exists for lead, mold, bed bugs, radon, or asbestos. Every state duty and every stated absence, hazard by hazard: Lead (state add-on to the federal rule) — no state duty. Missouri adds nothing to the federal lead rule for landlords: no state form, no registration, no certificate and no repeat disclosure. Its lead chapter is an assessment, abatement and licensing program. An owner told in writing that a lead hazard is present must abate it or put interim controls in place, and may instead take a rental property off the market; no tenant may be evicted because someone in the unit has an elevated blood lead level or because of anything the owner is required to do. There is one tenant-facing lead notice in Missouri law, and it does not bind the landlord: the lead abatement contractor, and any agency or organization making grants or loans for lead work, must tell the owners and tenants of a dwelling that information about potential lead hazards is on the health department's website, and the written notification the department prescribes must include the licensed risk assessor's disclosure of any potential lead hazards to the owners and tenants. Mold — no state duty. Missouri has no indoor-mold law of any kind: no disclosure, no standard and no remediation duty. The word appears in the statutes only in the industrial sense, in the sections about molded plastics, dies, forms and duplicated boat hulls, and in the health rules only as a sanitation standard for ice machines and restroom ventilation in lodging establishments. Bed bugs — no state duty. Missouri has no bed-bug provision anywhere in its statutes or its health rules: no disclosure, no treatment duty and no notice. Radon — no state duty. Missouri has no radon statute at all — not for leases, not for sales, not for schools — and no radon rule in the health department's radiation chapter. Nothing requires a landlord to test for radon or to say anything about it. Methamphetamine — in force — a state duty, before signing, in writing (a statute). Where premises to be rented or leased are or were used as a site for methamphetamine production, the owner, landlord or other transferor must disclose that fact in writing to the prospective tenant, if the landlord knows of the prior production. The landlord must disclose any prior knowledge of methamphetamine production whether or not anyone involved was convicted. No wording is prescribed, no form exists, no signature is required, and the disclosure is owed to a prospective tenant, so it comes before the lease is signed. The section states no penalty of any kind: it is a single paragraph with no damages figure, no public enforcer and no lease remedy. A landlord's separate duty to disclose a prior occupant's methamphetamine-related criminal convictions once existed in a second version of the same section number and was repealed in 2011; that conviction list survives only on the sales side. Knowledge standard: The owner, landlord or other transferor has knowledge of the prior methamphetamine production; the statute adds that the disclosure is owed whether or not the people involved in the production were convicted, and it does not define knowledge. In force since August 28, 2001. Asbestos — no state duty. Missouri requires no asbestos disclosure to a tenant. Asbestos appears in its statutes only in hazardous-waste and prevailing-wage provisions, and in the lead-licensing rules only as a cross-reference to the separate asbestos program. Radioactive or hazardous-material contamination — in force — a state duty, before signing, in writing (a statute). Where premises to be rented or leased are or were previously contaminated with radioactive material or other hazardous material, the owner, landlord or other transferor must disclose that in writing to the prospective tenant, if the landlord has knowledge of the contamination. Knowledge here is tighter than in the methamphetamine section and the statute defines it: the landlord must have received a report stating affirmatively that the premises is or was contaminated. No wording is prescribed and no form exists. This is the only disclosure duty in Missouri law carrying a criminal penalty. Knowledge standard: Knowledge is defined by the section itself: the owner, seller, landlord or other transferor has received a report stating affirmatively that the premises is or was previously contaminated with radioactive material or other hazardous material. In force since August 28, 2018. If the duty is not met: A landlord who does not make the disclosure, having the defined knowledge, is guilty of a class A misdemeanor. The section states no civil damages and creates no private action. |
| Flood disclosure | No. Missouri requires no flood disclosure to a tenant, and it requires none to a buyer either. The word flood does not appear in the landlord chapter, the landlord-tenant actions chapter or the titles and conveyances chapter, and the eighty-one places it appears elsewhere in the statutes are floodplain management, levee districts, insurance and disaster provisions. Missouri has no seller property-condition disclosure statute at all, so unlike most states there is not even a sales-only rule that a tenant might be pointed to: the state's whole transfer-disclosure architecture is four narrow sections — methamphetamine production, radioactive or hazardous contamination, psychologically impacted property and sale leaseback — and none of them mentions flooding. The health department's sanitation rules mention flooding only as a siting standard for construction. |
| Disclosures about the property's situation | Missouri's newest disclosure is not about a hazard but about a transaction, and it lands on a person who is about to become a tenant. Since August 28, 2026 the Missouri Residential Sale Leaseback Protection Act covers a sale leaseback: a transaction in which someone sells the home they live in and, as a condition of the sale or as part of the same or a related transaction, takes a lease or rental agreement to stay in or move back into the property. In one of those, the buyer must give the seller a single-page disclosure, clear and conspicuous and printed in boldface, in words the statute sets out: that signing means selling the home and no longer owning it, that the seller may be evicted for not following the lease, may lose the right to buy the home back, and may see effects on credit, taxes and legal rights; that the seller is encouraged to speak with an attorney, a real estate agent, a housing counselor, a tax advisor and a real estate appraiser; that no sale leaseback may close for at least thirty days after the agreement is signed; and that the seller should not sign without fully understanding the terms. The disclosure must reach the seller at least fourteen calendar days before the agreement is executed, must be signed by both the seller and the buyer at execution, and a copy of the signed disclosure must go back to the seller within five days. No title may be delivered, recorded or otherwise transferred until thirty days after the agreement is signed. The section reaches residential real estate of one to four dwelling units that is or was the seller's residence, where the seller is a natural person. A violation carries a civil penalty of up to ten thousand dollars, the attorney general may sue for an injunction, penalties and restitution, and a seller who is harmed may recover actual damages, statutory damages of ten thousand dollars on top, attorney fees and costs, and equitable relief. The duties cannot be modified or waived by agreement. Separately, a buyer of a rented property must give tenants written notice of the transfer, its means and its date (section 535.081), and cannot collect rent without it. Nothing else: Missouri requires no sex-offender notice, no statement about a death in the unit, no military or airport noise-zone notice, no demolition or condominium-conversion notice, no foreclosure or pending-sale notice and no shoreline notice. |
| 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 | Missouri puts no utility or fee disclosure on a landlord. There is no shared-meter, submetering, ratio-billing or apportionment disclosure, no duty to itemize fees or to quote a single all-in monthly figure, no rent-receipt duty, no payment-method rule, and no concession, renter's-insurance, smoking-policy or rent-reporting disclosure. Missouri has no late-fee statute at all, so nothing needs to be said in the lease about late fees either. The state's one utility notice runs from the utility, not the landlord: at least five days before heat-related utility service to a master-metered multitenant dwelling is cut off for non-payment, the gas or electrical corporation must tell the tenants of the delinquency and of their right to start a receivership, by posting written notice in the common areas where tenants will actually see it; the utility or any tenant may then ask the circuit court to appoint a receiver of the rents. The one fee-adjacent lease rule is the carpet-cleaning provision in the deposit section, with its requirement of an actual-cost receipt within thirty days of the end of the tenancy. Deposits, including the two-month cap and the double-damages remedy for wrongful withholding, are on the deposits page; application and screening fees are on the application-fee page. |
| Lease clauses that are void or prohibited | No enumerated list — Missouri has no list of prohibited lease clauses. There is no statute banning exculpatory clauses in a residential lease — the word does not appear anywhere in the Revised Statutes — no confession-of-judgment rule reaching real property, and no unconscionability provision in any of the three chapters that carry this topic. What exists is three narrow voidness rules, each tied to a particular right: the nuisance and receivership protections, the repair-and-deduct right, and the sale-leaseback duties. Everything else in a Missouri residential lease is a matter of contract. One provision runs the other way and voids the lease rather than a clause: where a tenant permits gaming, a bawdyhouse or the illegal possession, sale or distribution of controlled substances on the premises, the lease becomes void and the landlord may re-enter. Sanction as the statute states it: None of the three rules puts a price on writing the clause. The waiver is void and nothing more. The money remedies in the sale-leaseback section — a civil penalty of up to ten thousand dollars, the attorney general's enforcement action, and a harmed seller's claim for actual damages plus ten thousand dollars in statutory damages and fees — attach to failing to give the disclosure, not to including a waiver, though a waiver written after August 28, 2026 is void from the outset rather than merely unenforceable. The general provisions: • Any provision of a lease or other agreement waiving or denying a provision of the nuisance-abatement and receivership sections (sections 441.500 to 441.643) for the benefit of an occupant of a dwelling unit is against public policy and void (section 441.610). • No lease agreement may contain a waiver of the tenant's repair-and-deduct rights (section 441.234, subsection 2). • Any part of an agreement executed, modified or extended after August 28, 2026 that modifies or waives a duty or remedy under the sale-leaseback section is void from the outset and unenforceable (section 442.920, subsection 6). |
| Attorney-fee clauses | No statute addresses attorney-fee clauses in residential leases as such. Missouri has no reciprocity statute, no prevailing-party rule for residential tenancies and no cap, so a lease clause making the tenant pay the landlord's attorney fees stands on its own terms and nothing converts it into a mutual one. Fee awards exist only inside particular proceedings: a petitioner who files a nuisance-abatement petition frivolously and in bad faith pays the reasonable fees of defending it, the expedited drug-eviction procedure has its own fee section, and a seller harmed by a sale-leaseback violation may recover fees and costs. |
| When, how, and what happens on a failure | Missouri's disclosure duties are few and their timing is simple. At or before the tenancy begins: the written identity of the manager and of the owner or the owner's agent for service and notices. Before the lease is signed, to a prospective tenant: the written methamphetamine-production disclosure where the landlord knows of it, and the written radioactive or hazardous-contamination disclosure where the landlord has received a report saying the premises is or was contaminated. In the lease itself: the carpet-cleaning provision, if the landlord means to charge for it. In a sale leaseback: the boldface single-page disclosure at least fourteen days before the agreement is executed, signed by both parties at execution, with a copy back to the seller within five days and no transfer of title for thirty days. On a sale of the property: written notice of the transfer to the tenants. Every duty is a writing, none may be posted instead, nothing recurs annually or at renewal, and only the sale-leaseback disclosure requires a signature. The remedies are uneven to a degree worth stating plainly. The methamphetamine disclosure states no consequence at all — the section is a single paragraph with no damages, no public enforcer and no lease remedy, and nothing in either landlord chapter points to the state's unfair-practices law. The identity disclosure has no damages figure either; its sanction is that whoever fails to disclose becomes the landlord's agent, not only for service and notices but for performing the landlord's obligations and collecting the rent. The contamination disclosure is enforced by criminal law alone, as a class A misdemeanor, with no civil claim stated. Only the sale-leaseback disclosure carries a modern package: a civil penalty of up to ten thousand dollars, enforcement by the attorney general, and a private action for actual damages plus ten thousand dollars in statutory damages, fees and equitable relief, none of it waivable. On the deposit side, wrongful withholding costs twice the amount withheld. |
| Can cities add their own rules | Partly — state law preempts local rules on some subjects and leaves others to the locality or open. Missouri preempts a closed list of local rental ordinances, and lease disclosures are not on it. No county or city, including one with a charter form of government, may enact, maintain or enforce an ordinance regulating the amount of rent charged for privately owned residential or commercial rental property. Since August 28, 2025 the same section also bars a local ordinance that stops a landlord refusing to rent to someone because their lawful source of income includes housing assistance, that restricts a landlord's use of income-qualifying methods, credit scores, credit reports, eviction or property-damage history or criminal history according to the landlord's own customary criteria or stops the landlord asking for that information, that limits how large a security deposit a landlord may require, or that gives tenants an automatic right of first refusal. Three carve-outs survive: property the locality itself owns, voluntary agreements regulating rent on subsidized properties, and ordinances restricting rent on properties assisted with community development block grant funds; and a locality may still forbid discrimination against a tenant solely because the tenant receives veterans' benefits. Nothing in that list touches a local lease-disclosure or lease-content ordinance, so the state is silent on that question. On the other side, Missouri expressly authorizes some local action: political subdivisions and state agencies may impose lead requirements more stringent than the state's; one first-class county with between one hundred fifty thousand and two hundred thousand inhabitants may adopt rules or ordinances to ensure the habitability of rented residences, with a minimum list covering structure, water and hot water, sewer, electricity, heat and basic security including locking doors and windows; and the City of St. Louis and Jackson County are authorized to run landlord-tenant courts with their own commissioners. No big-city lease packet is carried 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 | This page rests on the statutes and rules cited below |
Cite this page: "Landlord Atlas, Missouri Lease Disclosure Laws & Required Lease Terms (verified September 13, 2026), landlordatlas.com/laws/lease-disclosures/missouri/" — free to cite and quote with a link (how these records are verified). Everything above is cited in the citations section below.
Missouri hazard disclosures at a glance
Two rows below are in-force state duties to disclose, hand over, attach or post a hazard notice as part of renting; the federal lead-paint rule applies on top for housing built before 1978. Each row's full text, trigger, threshold and remedy are in the table above.
| Hazard | Status | When | Form | Prescribed document |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lead (state add-on to the federal rule) | None | — | — | — |
| Mold | None | — | — | — |
| Bed bugs | None | — | — | — |
| Radon | None | — | — | — |
| Methamphetamine | In force | Before signing | In writing | — |
| Asbestos | None | — | — | — |
| Radioactive or hazardous-material contamination | 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.
- Every landlord of housing built before 1978: Lead-based paint disclosure for leases of pre-1978 housing (in force).
- Owners of HUD-assisted, HUD-insured or HUD-acquired rental property in a floodplain: Flood acknowledgment in leases of HUD-assisted, HUD-acquired and HUD-insured property (in force).
- Landlords renting to a Housing Choice Voucher holder: Housing Choice Voucher written lease and tenancy addendum (in force).
- Covered housing providers under the Violence Against Women Act (federally assisted programs): Notice of occupancy rights under the Violence Against Women Act and the certification form (in force).
- Owners of project-based Section 8 housing: Thirty-day pre-eviction notification as a required lease provision (project-based Section 8) (in force).
- Owners of project-based Section 8 housing: Federal prohibited lease clauses and required addendum (project-based Section 8, part 883 projects) (in force).
- Anyone who signs or delivers a lease electronically: Electronic leases and signatures under the federal E-SIGN Act (in force).
- Everyone who offers a dwelling for rent: Fair housing poster (a posting duty, not a lease term) (in force).
- No one — no such federal duty exists: Radon, mold, asbestos and methamphetamine: no federal disclosure duty to residential tenants.
Notes and caveats
- No general tenant-rights document — Missouri prescribes no tenant-rights statement, summary, handbook or model lease, and no agency is directed to publish one. The only block of prescribed wording in this topic belongs to the sale-leaseback disclosure.
- No written lease and no copy duty — A lease may be oral. An oral letting of more than a year cannot be sued on and takes effect as a tenancy at will, but nothing requires a written lease, and no statute requires the landlord to hand the tenant a copy of a signed one.
- No move-in checklist and no deposit notice at signing — Missouri requires no condition report of any kind, and a landlord may withhold from the deposit to restore the unit to its condition at the start of the tenancy without any record of what that condition was. The only inspection notice comes after the tenancy ends, and the deposit writings are all on the deposits page.
- The methamphetamine disclosure has no penalty — The section is a single paragraph. It states no damages, no public enforcer and no remedy in the lease, and neither landlord chapter points to the state's unfair-practices law.
- The conviction-history disclosure was repealed in 2011 — Missouri once had a second version of the same section number requiring a landlord to disclose a prior occupant's methamphetamine-related convictions. A 2011 act repealed it, and the surviving text has no conviction clause. The conviction list still exists on the sales side, for a seller rather than a landlord.
- The contamination disclosure is criminal only — A landlord who fails to disclose known radioactive or hazardous contamination commits a class A misdemeanor. The section gives no damages and creates no private claim, and its definition of knowledge is narrow: the landlord must have received a report stating affirmatively that the premises is or was contaminated.
- No radon, mold or bed-bug law at all — These are not gaps in the landlord chapter; the words do not appear in Missouri's statutes in the relevant sense anywhere. The mold references are to molded plastics and dies.
- No flood disclosure, to tenants or buyers — Missouri has no seller property-condition disclosure statute, so there is not even a sales-only flood rule to point to. Its four transfer disclosures concern methamphetamine, hazardous contamination, psychologically impacted property and sale leasebacks.
- Silence about a death or a crime is a sales-side rule — A statute says that a property being psychologically impacted — the site of a homicide, another felony or a suicide, or occupied by someone with a disease unlikely to be transmitted by occupancy — is not a material fact that must be disclosed in a sale, exchange or other transfer, and bars a claim against a real estate agent or broker for not disclosing it. It speaks of buyers and transferees rather than tenants, and Missouri names leases expressly elsewhere when it means to reach them, so whether it covers a rental is not settled by the text.
- No utility or fee disclosure, and no late-fee statute — Nothing requires a landlord to explain how a utility bill is divided or to itemize fees, and Missouri has no late-fee law. The one utility notice is owed by the gas or electric company, which must post a warning in the common areas at least five days before cutting heat-related service to a master-metered building.
- New in 2026: the sale-leaseback warning — Where a homeowner sells and stays on as a tenant, the buyer must give a single-page boldface warning at least fourteen days before the agreement is signed, both parties sign it, a copy goes back within five days, and no title may transfer for thirty days. It carries a civil penalty of up to ten thousand dollars, enforcement by the attorney general, and a private claim for actual damages plus ten thousand dollars in statutory damages and fees. It cannot be waived.
- A one-way attorney-fee clause stands — Missouri neither converts nor bans a clause making the tenant pay the landlord's fees. Fee awards exist only inside particular proceedings, such as a frivolous nuisance petition or the expedited drug-eviction procedure.
- Cities are preempted on rent, screening and deposits, not on disclosures — Local ordinances regulating rent, protecting a tenant's source of income, restricting screening criteria, limiting deposits or granting an automatic right of first refusal are barred, with narrow carve-outs. Lease disclosures are not on that list. Localities may impose stricter lead requirements, one county may adopt a habitability code for rented residences, and two of them run their own landlord-tenant courts.
- No court decisions are relied on — No Missouri decision construing the disclosure sections on this page was found, so none is cited.
- Related pages — Deposits, application and screening fees, entry notice, rent-increase notice, habitability and repairs, lease termination and eviction each have their own Missouri page. Missouri has no late-fee statute, which is what the late-fee page says.
- Legislation — No bill is live. Ten measures touching the landlord and tenant chapter died when the session adjourned on May 15, 2026, and Missouri carries nothing over; most concerned newly numbered sections, which often means refilings when the legislature returns in January 2027. The one 2026 act that changed an answer on this page, the sale-leaseback act, took effect on August 28, 2026 and is reflected above.
Common questions: Missouri 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 Missouri 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. Missouri requires no tenant-rights statement, no summary of the landlord-tenant law, no handbook, no model lease and no agency form that a landlord must hand over or attach, and it directs no agency to publish one.
- Does a Missouri 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 tenancy begins, the landlord of residential property, or anyone authorized to make a rental agreement for the landlord, must disclose to the tenant in writing the name and address of two people: the person authorized to manage the premises, and 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.
- Is a move-in inspection checklist required in Missouri?
- No. Missouri requires no move-in condition statement, inventory, checklist or walk-through, and no documentation of the unit's condition is a precondition to keeping any part of the deposit. The deposit section lets the landlord withhold to restore the unit to its condition at the commencement of the tenancy, ordinary wear and tear excepted, and asks for no record of what that condition was.
- What hazards must a Missouri landlord disclose to a tenant?
- Two in-force state hazard disclosures: methamphetamine (before signing) and radioactive or hazardous-material contamination (before signing). No state duty exists for lead, mold, bed bugs, radon, or asbestos.
- Does Missouri require flood disclosure to renters?
- No. Missouri requires no flood disclosure to a tenant, and it requires none to a buyer either. The word flood does not appear in the landlord chapter, the landlord-tenant actions chapter or the titles and conveyances chapter, and the eighty-one places it appears elsewhere in the statutes are floodplain management, levee districts, insurance and disaster provisions.
- Does Missouri void or prohibit specific lease clauses?
- No enumerated list — Missouri has no list of prohibited lease clauses. There is no statute banning exculpatory clauses in a residential lease — the word does not appear anywhere in the Revised Statutes — no confession-of-judgment rule reaching real property, and no unconscionability provision in any of the three chapters that carry this topic.
Citations
- § 441.005 RSMo · (2), (4) (verified 2026) Official source
- § 441.020 RSMo (verified 2026) Official source
- § 441.043 RSMo · 1–4 (verified 2026) Official source
- § 441.234 RSMo · 2 (verified 2026) Official source
- § 441.236 RSMo (verified 2026) Official source
- § 441.610 RSMo (verified 2026) Official source
- § 441.643 RSMo (verified 2026) Official source
- § 441.650 RSMo · 1–3 (verified 2026) Official source
- § 441.850 RSMo (verified 2026) Official source
- § 535.081 RSMo (verified 2026) Official source
- § 535.185 RSMo · 1–3 (verified 2026) Official source
- § 535.200, § 535.210 RSMo (verified 2026) Official source
- § 535.300 RSMo · 3, 4(2), 5, 6 (verified 2026) Official source
- § 442.055 RSMo (verified 2026) Official source
- § 442.600 RSMo · 1–3 (verified 2026) Official source
- § 442.606 RSMo · 1–2 (verified 2026) Official source
- § 442.920 RSMo · 2–6 (verified 2026) Official source
- § 432.010, § 432.050, § 432.060 RSMo (verified 2026) Official source
- § 432.210, § 432.230 RSMo (Uniform Electronic Transactions Act) · § 432.210(1)–(2) (verified 2026) Official source
- § 701.308, § 701.309, § 701.348 RSMo · § 701.308(1)–(2); § 701.309(2), (4) (verified 2026) Official source
- § 64.207 RSMo (verified 2026) Official source
- House Bill 2636 (2026), truly agreed to and finally passed (the sale-leaseback act) (verified 2026) Official source
- House Bills 595 and 343 (2025), truly agreed to and finally passed (the preemption rewrite) (verified 2026) Official source
- House Bill 315 (2011), truly agreed to and finally passed (repealing the duplicate version of § 441.236) (verified 2026) Official source
- 19 CSR 30-70 (lead abatement and assessment licensing) and 19 CSR 20-8 (lead program) · 19 CSR 30-70.650(2)(M) (verified 2026) Official source
How this record was verified: Direct reading of the Revised Statutes of Missouri on the Revisor of Statutes' own site, which stamps every section page with its own effective date and an all-versions table. Four chapters were pulled whole and read section by section: chapter 441 (landlord and tenant, 74 sections), chapter 535 (landlord-tenant actions, 23 sections), chapter 442 (titles and conveyances, 77 sections) and chapter 701 (the lead assessment and abatement program). Sections 432.010, 432.050, 432.060, 432.210, 432.230 and 64.207 were read individually. Terms were run inside each chapter with every hit enumerated — radon, mold, bed bug, methamphetamine, flood, asbestos, lead, sex offender, exculpatory, confession of judgment, unconscionable, waive, void, attorney, disclose, writing, written, notice, smoking, insurance, utility and electronic — and then run across the whole code on the Revisor's own full-text search, whose zero-result wording was recorded verbatim so a real zero is not read as an error: radon and bedbug and exculpatory return no matches at all; mold returns ten sections, all about molded plastics, dies and boat hulls; asbestos seventeen, all hazardous-waste and prevailing-wage; methamphetamine twenty-two, of which only two are disclosure sections; flood eighty-one, none a lease or sale disclosure. The Code of State Regulations was read on the Secretary of State's site, six chapters in full — 19 CSR 20-3 (general sanitation), 20-8 (lead program), 20-9 (toxic substances), 20-10 (ionizing radiation), 30-1 (controlled substances) and 30-70 (lead abatement and assessment licensing) — each carrying its own publication stamp on every page, and every hit on landlord, tenant, lessee, lease, rental, disclosure, radon, methamphetamine, bed bug, mold, asbestos and flood was enumerated with its context. Enactment currency rests on the Senate's own statutes-affected table for the 2026 regular session, which lists every bill that proposed to touch each section together with the stage each version reached, checked section by section for chapters 441, 442, 534, 535 and 701, alongside the 102-bill list of measures truly agreed to and finally passed; each disposition was then read on the bill's own page and in the enrolled text, including House Bill 2636 of 2026 (approved by the Governor July 9, 2026, effective August 28, 2026), House Bills 595 and 343 of 2025, and House Bill 315 of 2011, which was read in full because it settles which of two 2001 versions of the methamphetamine section survives. The 2026 session adjourned May 15, 2026 with no carryover, and Missouri's uniform effective date of August 28 has passed, so the 2026 acts on this page are in force and folded into the posted text. Verified September 13, 2026.
What was read to state each absence on this page:
- The landlord-tenant chapter: Chapter 441 RSMo (landlord and tenant, 74 sections) and chapter 535 RSMo (landlord-tenant actions, 23 sections) pulled whole from the Revisor's own whole-chapter route and read section by section, every history line and effective-date stamp present. Terms run inside both chapters with every hit enumerated: radon, mold, bed bug, methamphetamine, flood, asbestos, lead, sex offender, exculpatory, confession of judgment, unconscionable, waive, void, attorney, disclose, writing, written, notice, smoking, insurance, utility, electronic. Chapter 441 returns zero on radon, mold, bed bug, flood, asbestos, sex offender, exculpatory, confession of judgment and unconscionable; its two lead hits are cross-references with no lead-paint duty and its five methamphetamine hits are all section 441.236. Chapter 535 returns zero on every one of those terms except one disclosure hit, section 535.185. Sections 432.010, 432.050, 432.060, 432.210 and 432.230 read individually. Code-wide searching on the Revisor's own full-text interface, with the zero-result wording recorded verbatim so that a genuine zero is not mistaken for an error: radon, bedbug, exculpatory and the pairing of sex offender with lease each return no matches; mold returns ten sections, all enumerated and none about indoor air; asbestos seventeen; methamphetamine twenty-two, of which only two are disclosure sections; flood eighty-one; confession of judgment three; unconscionable fourteen; the pairing of landlord with ordinance three; tenant with disclose seven; landlord with disclose eight; copy of the lease five, none residential. Enactment currency from the Senate's statutes-affected table for the 2026 regular session, read section by section for chapters 441, 442, 534, 535 and 701 with each bill's furthest stage recorded, alongside the 102-bill list of measures truly agreed to and finally passed, with dispositions read on the bill pages and in the enrolled acts. The session adjourned May 15, 2026 with no carryover, and the uniform effective date of August 28 has passed.
- The real-estate sales-disclosure chapter: Chapter 442 RSMo (titles and conveyances, 77 sections) pulled whole and sectioned. Missouri has no seller property-condition disclosure statute, so there is no sales-side disclosure form or scope clause to quote: the chapter's disclosure sections are section 442.055 (radioactive or hazardous contamination, which reaches leases on its face), section 442.600 (psychologically impacted property, framed as a sale, exchange or other transfer), section 442.606 (methamphetamine production, framed as a sale, exchange or transfer to a buyer or transferee) and section 442.920 (sale leaseback, enacted 2026). Term hits inside the chapter: lessee in sections 442.055 and 442.558; disclose in sections 442.055, 442.600, 442.606 and 442.920; methamphetamine in section 442.606; and zero for radon, mold, bed bug, asbestos and flood.
- Public-health, environmental and professions titles: Chapter 701 RSMo (the lead assessment, abatement and licensing program with the sanitation and sewage sections) pulled whole and sectioned: the word landlord appears zero times; tenant appears in sections 701.305, 701.308 and 701.309; disclose in section 701.309. Sections 701.308, 701.309 and 701.348 read in full. The code-wide term work described above covers the rest of the health and environmental provisions: the seventeen asbestos sections are hazardous-waste and prevailing-wage provisions, the twenty-two methamphetamine sections are criminal, precursor-control and law-enforcement provisions apart from sections 441.236 and 442.606, and radon returns nothing anywhere in the statutes.
- Administrative code: The Code of State Regulations on the Secretary of State's own site, six chapters read in full from the official division index, each carrying its publication stamp on every page: 19 CSR 20-3 (general sanitation, of text), 19 CSR 20-8 (lead program, stamped March 31, 2025), 19 CSR 20-9 (toxic substances), 19 CSR 20-10 (protection against ionizing radiation), 19 CSR 30-1 (controlled substances) and 19 CSR 30-70 (lead abatement and assessment licensing and training accreditation, stamped August 31, 2020). Terms run: landlord, tenant, lessee, lease, rental, disclose, radon, methamphetamine, bed bug, mold, asbestos, flood — every hit enumerated with its context. The only tenant-facing rule in the whole set is the definition of notification in 19 CSR 30-70.650(2)(M), which requires the licensed risk assessor's disclosure of potential lead hazards to owners and tenants before a lead abatement project: a licensed contractor's duty, not a landlord's. 19 CSR 20-8 returns zero on every term and two of its three rules were rescinded in 2000; 19 CSR 20-3's mold hits are ice-machine and restroom-ventilation standards for lodging establishments and its flood hits are siting standards; 19 CSR 30-1's methamphetamine hits are scheduling and precursor rules. No rule in the Missouri Code of State Regulations imposes a landlord-to-tenant disclosure duty.
- Local-government title: Section 441.043 RSMo read in full in its current form, together with the enrolled 2025 act that rewrote it, and the all-versions table showing the prior text running from August 28, 1989 to August 28, 2025. Sections 701.348, 64.207, 535.200 and 535.210 read in full for the authorizations. The code-wide pairing of landlord with ordinance returns exactly three sections, all read: the preemption section and the two landlord-tenant court sections. Section 82.817, the St. Louis City service-agent rule, was read and is not a tenant disclosure. The county and municipal titles were not otherwise opened for this topic.