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

No statute requires a residential lease to be in writing beyond the statute of frauds, so an oral tenancy is lawful. No statute requires the landlord to give the tenant a copy of the lease.

New Hampshire regulates what a landlord and a tenant may do to each other and how a possession case runs; it does not legislate the lease document. No statute requires a residential lease to be in writing, none requires the landlord to give the tenant a copy of anything at signing, and none sets a deadline for doing so. There is no translation duty, no plain-language act, no type-size rule and no placement rule. The only statute-of-frauds threshold that reaches a lease is the general one-year clause. One payment rule does bind every lease: a landlord may not require a tenant or prospective tenant to pay any amount due under a lease, renewal or extension solely by electronic funds transfer, including automatic recurring transfers, and must allow at least one other non-electronic form of payment.

Statute of frauds: An agreement that is not to be performed within one year from the time of making it must be in writing and signed by the party to be charged, or by someone that party authorized in writing, before an action can be brought on it (RSA 506:2). So a residential lease that cannot be performed within a year has to be written; a lease of a year or less is enforceable orally. The neighboring section in the same chapter is captioned Sale of Land and reaches only a contract for the sale of land, not a lease.

Electronic leases and signatures: New Hampshire's electronic-transactions act, RSA chapter 294-E, applies to electronic records and signatures relating to a transaction and excepts only wills, codicils, testamentary trusts and most of the commercial code, so there is no residential-lease carve-out and a lease may be signed electronically. One limit is worth knowing: the chapter says it is not intended to authorize electronic delivery of the classes of notice the federal electronic-signatures act sets aside, which include certain eviction, foreclosure and utility-cutoff notices. The landlord-tenant chapters themselves say nothing either way about electronic delivery of any notice on this page, so that silence is silence rather than permission.

No disclosure to the tenant is required; the state has a landlord or agent registration statute instead.

New Hampshire gives the tenant nothing. There is no duty anywhere in the landlord-tenant chapters to tell a tenant who owns or manages the building. What exists instead is a filing: an owner of restricted property, whether the owner lives in the state or outside it, must file a statement with the clerk of the town or city where the property sits, within thirty days of becoming the owner, giving the name, address and telephone number of a person within the state authorized to accept service of process for any legal proceeding about the property. That person may be the owner. A municipality may charge a reasonable filing fee to cover the clerk's cost of keeping the record, and the governing body of a municipality may set a fine of up to one hundred dollars for failing to file. The sanction that actually bites falls in court rather than on the tenant's doorstep: where an out-of-state owner neither files nor appears, service made under the long-arm statute carries a rebuttable presumption that it was lawful and adequate, and the proceedings that count include enforcement of the state housing standards or of any municipal housing, health, building or fire and life-safety code. A tenant who wants to know who owns the building looks it up at the clerk's office. One other identity notice exists on this page but it is deposit-anchored rather than general: a landlord who transfers the property must hand the deposit to the new holder and tell the tenant by registered or certified mail who that is.

Threshold: Restricted property only. Nonrestricted property — which owes nothing — means a single-family house where the owner does not own more than three single-family houses at any one time, a rental unit in an owner-occupied building of four dwelling units or fewer, and a single-family house a bank or other mortgagee acquired through foreclosure. Manufactured housing parks are excluded outright.

No.

New Hampshire prescribes no tenant-rights document, no summary of the act, no handbook, no model lease and no agency form, and no statute says what a residential lease must contain. The state's rules portal lists no landlord-tenant agency at all, so there is no form to watch. The chapters tell a landlord what a lease may not contain, never what it must. The single place the legislature has fixed any wording is a rooming-house room-change request an occupant signs, which is listed here and does not bind a landlord of an ordinary tenancy. One other piece of prescribed wording exists in the code but belongs elsewhere: the content a thirty-day termination notice must carry when a landlord ends a tenancy to abate a lead hazard, which is on the lease-termination page.

Listed, but not a general duty counted above:

Rooming-house room-change request statement — words or content the lease itself must carry. Rooms in a rooming or boarding house rented to transient guests for fewer than ninety consecutive days sit outside the tenancy chapter, and moving an occupant between rooms does not restart the ninety-day clock. A voluntary move at the occupant's own request does break the count, but only where the occupant was first told of the exemption and given a copy of the subparagraph, and only where the request is in writing and carries the words the statute sets out: a request to move from one room to another, and an acknowledgment of having received a copy of the subparagraph and of understanding that time in the first room does not count toward the ninety consecutive days of occupancy required for a tenancy. The occupant signs it, not the landlord, and nothing is fined if it is skipped — the clock simply keeps running. Listed here because the words are prescribed, and not counted because they are needed only where the owner wants the benefit of a voluntary move. The statute fixes the words. Threshold: Rooming and boarding houses only, and only on a room-to-room move made at the occupant's own request. (RSA 540:1-a, IV(a))

No report is required, but the landlord must tell the tenant of the right the statute gives, stated here.

The landlord prepares nothing. On receiving a deposit the landlord must forthwith give the tenant a signed receipt stating the amount and specifying where the deposit or the bond for it will be held, and must tell the tenant that any conditions in the rental unit needing repair or correction should be noted on the receipt or given to the landlord in writing within five days of occupancy. The notice duty survives the receipt exemption in terms: no receipt is required where the tenant pays the deposit by personal check, bank check or a check issued by a government or nonprofit agency on the tenant's behalf, but the statute says that regardless of whether a receipt is required the landlord must give written notice that a written list of conditions needing repair or correction should reach the landlord within five days of occupancy. No form is prescribed, no deadline binds the landlord beyond forthwith, and the tenant writes the list. The consequence is the strongest attached to any small disclosure in the state: a landlord who does not comply with this part of the deposit subdivision is deemed to have violated the consumer protection act, which makes it a per se unfair trade practice with that act's remedies behind it. The duty has its own coverage rule, narrower than the one that governs the identity filing: a person who rents a single-family residence and owns no other rental property, or who rents units in an owner-occupied building of five units or fewer, is not a landlord for this purpose — except for any individual unit in such a building occupied by a person aged sixty or older. Vacation and recreational lets are outside it, and a rental unit means one with full facilities for habitation, including contiguous living, sleeping, kitchen and bathroom facilities.

When and who signs: The landlord's written notice is owed forthwith on receiving a deposit; the tenant's own list of conditions needing repair or correction is due within five days of occupancy. Only the receipt is signed, and only by the landlord.

Deposit notice at signing: The signed receipt that carries the five-day notice must state the amount of the deposit and specify where it will be held (RSA 540-A:6, paragraph I(b)), with the check exemption in paragraph I(c). On request the landlord must also give the name of the bank, the account number, the amount on deposit and the interest rate and allow the records to be inspected, and a tenant may ask for accrued interest every three years; the figures and the return rules are on the deposits and deposit-interest pages.

Three in-force state hazard disclosures: lead (when the event the section names occurs and before signing); methamphetamine (before signing); and asbestos (with no timing stated). No state duty exists for mold, bed bugs, radon, or any other hazard.

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

Lead (state add-on to the federal rule) — in force — a state duty, when the event the section names occurs and before signing (a statute). New Hampshire adds no state form, registration or certificate to the federal lead-paint disclosure, but it does add a duty that fires during a tenancy and then reaches the next one. Whenever a child tests positive for lead above the state standard, the health and human services department tests the water in the unit. If the lead in the drinking water exceeds the federal action level, the landlord must notify the tenant or prospective tenant and install on the kitchen faucet a filtering device certified to reduce lead, following the standards for replacing the device and its cartridges; the duty ends once the source of the lead has been removed and the water tests below the action level, as the department verifies. Because the notice runs to a prospective tenant as well, the condition turns it into a disclosure owed before the next lease is signed. The section prescribes no form, sets no deadline and states no consequence, and it sits outside the remedy that covers the rest of the prohibited-practices section. A second, weaker duty is owed only on request: where the commissioner has issued a lead-hazard reduction order, the owner or the owner's agent must give a copy to the occupants of any dwellings on the same lot free of charge, though it is the state that serves the order itself and tells tenants about hazards found in common areas. In force since April 9, 2018.

Mold — no state duty. No New Hampshire statute or rule requires a mold disclosure to a tenant. The only structural provision in the state's law is an occupational-licensing section requiring third-party certification of anyone who carries out a mold assessment, which it defines as an inspection, investigation or survey of a dwelling or other structure to tell the owner whether mold is present. That imposes no duty on a landlord and prescribes no form.

Bed bugs — no state duty. New Hampshire has one of the more developed bed-bug regimes in the country and none of it is a disclosure to a prospective tenant. Everything fires after an infestation is reported: the landlord may not willfully fail to investigate a tenant's report of an infestation of insects, including bed bugs, or rodents within seven days of notice from the tenant or a municipal health or housing code authority, or fail to take reasonable measures to remediate; evaluation, planning and emergency remediation count as emergency repairs where the entry happened within seventy-two hours of the landlord first learning of the infestation; a tenant may not refuse entry to check whether bed bugs are present after the landlord learns of bed bugs in an adjacent unit or one directly above or below, provided the landlord gives forty-eight hours' written notice; and the landlord must give reasonable written preparation instructions at least seventy-two hours before remediation. The cost falls on the landlord, who may recover it from a tenant shown to be responsible by billing in writing, with non-payment within thirty days a ground for a nonpayment eviction, a landlord-borne burden of proof, a rebuttable presumption where no bed bugs were reported in the unit or its neighbors in the six months before and during the tenancy, and a four-factor test. Nothing there is owed before a lease is signed.

Radon — no state duty. No New Hampshire statute or rule requires a radon disclosure to a tenant. Radon appears in three places in the state's law: the health department's general duties, a certification requirement for airborne-radon mitigation installers, and the prescribed notification a seller gives a buyer before a purchase and sale contract. None of them reaches a lease.

Methamphetamine — in force — a state duty, before signing, in writing (a statute). In any lease or rental agreement, before signing an agreement to lease or rent real property, the lessor or owner must disclose in writing to the lessee or occupant whether, to the lessor's or owner's knowledge, methamphetamine production has occurred on the property, and, if it has, the disclosure must include a statement informing the lessee or occupant. The duty runs from the moment the prohibited conduct occurs until the environmental services department or a licensed specialist determines that the property meets the remediation cleanup standards, and that determination is public information available from the department on request. Until the department adopts cleanup standards by rule, the statute says the determination rests on the best scientific methods available; no such rules have been published. New Hampshire does not bar renting a contaminated unit, so this is a disclosure duty rather than a prohibition, and the section states no penalty for failing to give it. Knowledge standard: To the seller's, transferor's, lessor's or owner's knowledge. Threshold: Reaches any real property, with no unit count and no owner carve-out. The duty runs for the window that opens when conduct prohibited by the methamphetamine chapter occurs on the property and closes when the environmental services department, or a licensed environmental or hazardous-substances removal specialist, determines that the property meets the remediation cleanup standards. In force since January 1, 2007.

Asbestos — in force — a state duty, with no timing stated (a statute). A narrow duty, but a real one that names tenants. The owner of an asbestos disposal site must disclose to any person who uses, occupies or will likely disturb asbestos at the site — the statute gives a tenant and a contractor as its examples — the presence of asbestos waste, including its location and depth of cover to the extent known, and the need to comply with the chapter's requirements, including activity and property-use restrictions where they apply. No form is prescribed and no timing is stated, and the disclosure section itself carries no penalty; the incentive is that a site owner who has complied is shielded from the chapter's penalties for a release caused by a person the disclosure reached, provided the owner takes steps to prevent further release. The sale twin of the same section owes four items to a buyer before a purchase and sale contract, the former owner must tell the commissioner within ten days of a title transfer, and the condition is recorded in the chain of title. The rest of the chapter is exposure standards, inspection, licensing and enforcement, including the commissioner's power to inspect a rental dwelling and order abatement of regulated asbestos-containing material. Knowledge standard: The presence, location and depth of cover must be disclosed to the extent known. Threshold: Owners of an asbestos disposal site only, meaning land where asbestos waste exists in or on the ground because of dumping that ceased by July 10, 1981, including inactive disposal sites as the federal rules define them, and excluding any site subject to the state solid-waste permitting chapter.

Pesticide, pest-control, ordnance and noise-zone notices — no state duty. No New Hampshire statute or rule requires a pesticide-application notice, a pest-control-contract disclosure, a military ordnance notice or a noise-zone notice to a tenant. The one remaining pre-signing disclosure in the same chapter as the methamphetamine duty is about a public utility tariff rather than a hazard, and it is described in the utility, fee and payment row.

No.

New Hampshire has a flood paragraph, it is prescribed word for word, and it never touches a lease. The notification fires prior to the execution of any contract for the purchase and sale of any interest in real property that includes a building: the seller or the seller's agent gives it to the buyer, and the buyer acknowledges receipt by signing a copy. Five paragraphs are set out in the statute — radon, arsenic, lead, perfluoroalkyl substances and flood — and the flood paragraph tells the buyer that properties in coastal areas and along waterways may face increased risk of flooding over time, that a standard homeowner's policy typically does not cover flood damage, and that the buyer should work out whether separate flood insurance is needed and consult the federal emergency agency's flood maps. The flood and perfluoroalkyl paragraphs were added in 2024 and took effect on January 1, 2025. Even in the sale it governs, the section says nothing in it creates or places any liability on the seller or the seller's agent for failing to give the notification. Two companion sections in the same chapter, on private water supply and sewage disposal and on subsurface disposal approval, use the same purchase-and-sale trigger. Nothing in the landlord-tenant chapters mentions flooding at all.

No enumerated list — New Hampshire has legislated no roster of prohibited lease provisions: there is no confession-of-judgment item, no exculpation item, no attorney-fee item, no penalty or distraint item and no jury-waiver item. What it has is two general anti-waiver rules of different width. The broader one bars any provision by which a tenant waives rights under the tenancy chapter and declares the waiver null and void; the narrower one voids a waiver of the tenant's rights under the security-deposit subdivision, saving only an agreement about who holds the deposit after a conveyance. From July 1, 2027 one allocation is expressly permitted rather than waived: landlord and tenant will be able to agree which of them is responsible for snow and ice removal and safe access for specific areas, with a default that puts shared areas on the landlord of restricted property and areas set aside for one unit's exclusive use on that unit's tenants, and nothing in it altering responsibilities for areas governed by a condominium association, cooperative, homeowners' association or manufactured housing park.

Sanction as the statute states it: Both provisions strike the clause and stop there: one says the waiver is null and void, the other that the provision is void. Neither attaches damages, a rent multiple or a cure window to including such a clause in the lease, and there is no action to have a clause struck. The money in New Hampshire law attaches to breaking the underlying duty, mostly through the consumer protection act.

The general provisions:

• No lease or rental agreement, oral or written, may contain any provision by which a tenant waives any rights under the tenancy chapter, and any such waiver is null and void — a rule that reaches the whole of that chapter, including the notice periods, the grounds for eviction, the fitness defense to a nonpayment case, the retaliation defense and the bed-bug cost allocation (RSA 540:28).

• Any provision in a lease or rental agreement purporting to waive the tenant's rights under the security-deposit subdivision is void, except an agreement about transferring the deposit when the property is conveyed (RSA 540-A:8, paragraph III, with the exception in RSA 540-A:6, paragraph III(d)).

No statute addresses attorney-fee clauses in residential leases as such.

New Hampshire has no reciprocity statute, no general prevailing-party fee statute, no prohibition on a one-way landlord fee clause and no cap, so a lease that awards fees to the landlord alone is neither converted nor struck and a lease silent on fees leaves each side to bear its own. Three scoped statutory awards exist and none of them turns on a lease clause. A landlord or a tenant who violates the prohibited-practices provisions is subject to the consumer-protection act's civil remedies for the initial violation, including costs and reasonable attorney's fees, with each day a violation continues after a temporary order counting as a separate violation. A landlord who breaches the rule about storing a departed tenant's personal property is subject only to actual damages plus costs and reasonable attorney's fees. And where an action under the prohibited-practices section is found frivolous or brought solely for harassment, the plaintiff pays the defendant's costs including reasonable fees. Two figures travel with those remedies: damages of not less than three thousand dollars against a landlord for an unlawful lock-out where the premises have been re-let, and actual damages or one thousand dollars, whichever is greater, for a bad-faith allegation about unauthorized occupancy.

Yes — state law authorizes local governments to add rules of their own, as stated here.

New Hampshire hands municipalities the housing-code power by statute and preempts nothing on this page. Where the governing body of a municipality finds that it has dwellings unfit for human habitation through dilapidation, dangerous defects, an unhealthful lack of ventilation or sanitary facilities, or other unhealthy, hazardous or dilapidated conditions, the municipality has power to adopt ordinances, codes or bylaws to have those dwellings repaired, closed, demolished or removed. The tenancy chapter builds on that grant in three places: the definition of the proceedings that count against a non-filing owner expressly includes enforcement of any municipal housing code adopted under that chapter, or any municipal health, building or fire or life-safety code; a municipality may charge a reasonable fee for the clerk's filing and its governing body may set the hundred-dollar fine for not filing; and the defense to a nonpayment eviction is built on the standards of fitness for health and safety in that chapter or in local codes, ordinances or bylaws made under it. The one express preemption in the housing-code chapter is about short-term lets rather than leases: the power it confers may not be used to impose additional ordinances, codes, bylaws, licenses, certificates or other restrictions on dwellings used as a vacation rental or short-term rental, meaning one offered for a fee for fewer than thirty consecutive days, and such lets are outside the tenancy chapter altogether. New Hampshire has no rent-control statute either way — the phrase appears nowhere in its laws. No New Hampshire city carries a lease packet or disclosure ordinance on this page.