What must an Oklahoma 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.

No Oklahoma statute requires a residential lease to be in writing. The act assumes the opposite: unless the rental agreement fixes a definite term in writing, the tenancy is week-to-week for a roomer or boarder paying weekly rent and month-to-month in every other case. A lease for a term longer than one year must be written and signed to be enforceable. There is no duty to give the tenant a copy of the signed lease at all, and no duty to provide the lease or any notice in another language. Two things must appear in the agreement itself where they apply: the identification of the person authorized to accept service or notice, and, where the premises flooded in the past five years to the landlord's knowledge, that flood history.

Statute of frauds: An agreement for the leasing of real property for a longer period than one year is invalid unless it, or some note or memorandum of it, is in writing and signed by the party to be charged, and where an agent or broker signs for that party the agent's authority must itself be in writing (title 15, section 136, subsection A, paragraph 4).

Format and plain-language rules: Oklahoma prescribes no type size, no boldface, no capitalization, no placement rule and no plain-language regime for residential leases. The only formatting word in the landlord-tenant title is prominently, and it governs two lease-content items: the identification of the person authorized to accept service or notice, and the five-year flood history. Neither the statute nor any other provision says what prominently means.

Electronic leases and signatures: Oklahoma's Uniform Electronic Transactions Act applies with no landlord-tenant carve-out: a record or signature may not be denied legal effect solely because it is electronic, a contract may not be denied effect solely because an electronic record was used in forming it, an electronic record satisfies a law requiring a writing, and an electronic signature satisfies a law requiring a signature (title 12A, section 15-107). The landlord-tenant title says nothing about electronic records or signatures and carves nothing out, so a lease and the disclosures on this page may be signed and delivered electronically.

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.

Oklahoma's identity duty has two limbs and they work differently. The first is a lease-content rule: as part of any rental agreement the landlord must prominently and in writing identify what person at what address is entitled to accept service or notice under the act. The second is a separate duty to disclose to the tenant in writing, at or before the tenancy begins, the name and address of the person or persons authorized to manage the premises, or the owner or owners, or a person authorized to act for the owner in receiving service of process and notices. That or is the value: unlike most states, Oklahoma requires one of the three rather than all of them. Only a name and an address are required; no telephone number. The information must be kept current, and the duty binds any successor owner, landlord or manager. The consequence is a change of status rather than a fine: a person who fails to comply becomes a landlord for the purposes of the act, and an agent of every other landlord both for receiving service of process, notices and demands and for performing the landlord's obligations under the act and the agreement, including spending the rents collected from the premises on them. The act's definition of landlord absorbs a manager who has not complied. There is no fine, no damages figure and no bar on evicting. On a change of ownership or management, written notice to the tenant is not commanded but is the condition of the outgoing owner's or manager's release from liability for what happens afterwards, and the tenant pays future rent to the successor on receiving it. Oklahoma has no statewide landlord or rental registration.

If the landlord fails to comply: the non-complying manager or agent becomes the landlord's agent for notices and service of process and for performing the landlord's obligations, as the section states.

No general statement or document is prescribed, but the statutes or rules fix some of what the lease must say, listed here.

Oklahoma prescribes nothing of the kind: no statement of tenant rights, no summary of the act, no handbook, pamphlet or brochure, no agency form, no general prescribed lease wording, and not even a duty to tell the tenant where the act can be read. Only two things must appear in an Oklahoma lease, and both are duties to include information rather than prescribed words: the identification of the person authorized to accept service or notice, and the five-year flood history where the landlord knows of it. There is no required deposit recital, no domestic-violence or military-rights statement, no repair-remedy wording, no late-fee wording and no signed acknowledgment of anything. One state document exists and it belongs to nobody here: the environmental agency must publish and revise a lead-based paint hazard information pamphlet, but that is a duty on the agency, and no Oklahoma statute makes a landlord hand it over.

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

• The identification, prominently and in writing, of what person at what address is entitled to accept service or notice under the act (title 41, section 116, subsection A).

• Where the premises flooded within the past five years and the landlord knows it, that information, prominently and in writing (title 41, section 113a, subsection A).

No.

Oklahoma requires no move-in condition statement, inventory, checklist or walk-through, and no notice that the tenant may ask for one. The section that looks like a condition report runs the other way: any defective condition of the premises that comes to the tenant's attention, and that the tenant has reason to believe the landlord does not know about, must be reported by the tenant to the landlord as soon as practicable, with no form, no deadline beyond that phrase and no stated consequence. Deposit deductions do not depend on a move-in record either: the landlord may apply the deposit to damages from the tenant's non-compliance as itemized in a written statement at the end of the tenancy. A separate section requiring an inspection before rented furniture is removed is about furniture, not the dwelling.

Deposit notice at signing: The deposit must be kept in an escrow account for the tenant at a federally insured institution maintained in Oklahoma, but nothing requires the landlord to tell the tenant where it is held; the only deposit notice duty fires on a transfer, when the landlord must notify the tenants in writing of the transfer and of the transferee's name and address (title 41, section 115, subsections A and C). The deposits page carries the rest.

One in-force state hazard disclosure: methamphetamine (before signing). No state duty exists for lead, mold, bed bugs, radon, asbestos, or any other hazard.

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

Lead (state add-on to the federal rule) — no state duty. Oklahoma adds nothing to the federal lead-paint rule. The state's lead-based paint management article certifies people rather than tenancies: a lead-based paint contractor may not work on housing built before 1978 or on a child-occupied facility without certification from the environmental agency. There is no state form, no registration of pre-1978 rental units, no inspection certificate, no re-disclosure on renewal and no tenant notification anywhere in the article, and the words tenant, lessee and rental do not appear in it except in a railroad-bridge carve-out and in the contents of an agency pamphlet. The article also caps itself: the Board's rules must be consistent with the federal scheme and may not be more restrictive than the corresponding federal regulations unless the article specifically says so.

Mold — no state duty. Oklahoma has no mold provision for landlords or tenants anywhere in its statutes. The word does not appear in the landlord-tenant title at all, and the twenty-two places it appears in the rest of the code are about a molder's lien on tooling, motor vehicles, insurance, agriculture, mines and criminal offenses. There is no disclosure duty, no agency booklet and no direction to any agency to set a standard. A 2025 bill would have added a mold regime with penalties to the same section that carries the methamphetamine disclosure; it died in committee.

Bed bugs — no state duty. The phrase bed bug does not appear anywhere in the Oklahoma Statutes. There is no disclosure at signing, no notice during the tenancy, no duty to supply educational material and no rule about what a city may do.

Radon — no state duty. The word radon does not appear anywhere in the Oklahoma Statutes. There is no radon awareness act, no licensing of radon professionals, no disclosure to tenants, and not even a radon item in the list of subjects a seller must address on the sale-side property condition statement.

Methamphetamine — in force — a state duty, before signing (a statute). Before a rental agreement begins, a landlord who knows or has reason to know that the dwelling unit or any part of the premises was used to manufacture methamphetamine must disclose that to a prospective tenant. Two things about the duty are unusual. It is not required to be in writing: the statute prescribes no form, no words, no signed acknowledgment and no duty to hand over any assessment result. And it has a numeric safe harbor: where the landlord has had contamination assessed at no more than one-tenth of one microgram per hundred square centimeters of surface materials, nothing need be said. The section states no consequence for failing to disclose; the act's general provision gives a prevailing party attorney's fees in an action that has some other footing. There is no unit or building threshold. This is Oklahoma's only in-force hazard disclosure. Knowledge standard: The landlord knows or has reason to know that the dwelling unit or any part of the premises was used in the manufacture of methamphetamine. Threshold: No disclosure is required where the landlord has had the level of contamination assessed within the dwelling unit or the relevant part of the premises and it does not exceed one-tenth of one microgram per one hundred square centimeters of surface materials. The statute does not say who may assess, by what method or when, and no other Oklahoma statute sets a standard behind the figure. In force since November 1, 2010.

Asbestos — no state duty. No Oklahoma statute requires an asbestos disclosure to a tenant. The word appears forty-three times in the code and every occurrence is about environmental permitting and air quality, the licensing of asbestos contractors, asbestos litigation or workers' compensation. The landlord-tenant title does not use it.

Other hazard notices (pesticide, ordnance, pool, sprinkler, detector, smoking) — no state duty. Oklahoma requires no pesticide-application notice, no military-ordnance notice, no pest-control-contract disclosure, no pool-safety notice, no fire-sprinkler notice, no smoke-detector or carbon-monoxide notice and no smoking-policy disclosure. None of those words appears in the landlord-tenant title.

Yes — a statute requires the landlord to disclose whether the property has flooded within a stated period or a stated number of times to a prospective or current tenant, in the lease itself.

Where the premises to be rented have been flooded within the past five years and the landlord knows it, the landlord must include that information prominently and in writing as part of any written rental agreement. The trigger is history, not a map: there is no flood zone, no special flood hazard area and no elevation test anywhere in the section, and the five-year clock runs back from the renting. The knowledge standard is stricter than the one on the methamphetamine disclosure, which reaches a landlord who has reason to know; here the fact must be known to the landlord. Two limits will surprise readers. The section defines flooded and flooding as general and temporary conditions of partial or complete inundation of normally dry land and the structures on it from the overflow of lakes, ponds, streams, rivers, creeks and any other inland waters, so on its own words it does not reach coastal or tidal surge, rainfall or stormwater ponding, a sewer backup or a burst main. And the duty attaches to a written rental agreement, so an oral month-to-month tenancy, which the act expressly contemplates, has nothing to put the information in and the section commands nothing else. The remedy is bespoke and narrow: the tenant may sue and recover the personal property damages suffered from flooding of the premises. Nothing is prescribed about wording, type size or a signature. The state's sale-side property condition statement, which does carry a flood-zone item, runs from a seller to a purchaser before an offer is accepted and reaches a lease only where the lease carries an option to purchase, so it is not a tenant disclosure. Dating from 1986, this is one of the oldest lease flood statutes in the country.

Threshold: No unit count, building age or lease-term floor, but the duty attaches only to a written rental agreement, so a purely oral tenancy carries none. In force since November 1, 1986. If the duty is not met: A tenant who is a party to the agreement may sue the landlord in a court of appropriate jurisdiction and recover the personal property damages sustained from flooding of the premises. That is the whole remedy: no rescission, no termination, no statutory damages and no deposit consequence. The act's general provision then gives a prevailing party reasonable attorney's fees.

Yes — of the facts the rule names, some need not be disclosed and no cause of action arises from not disclosing some, each as stated here.

Oklahoma has a psychologically-impacted-property statute and, unusually, it names lessees. The fact or suspicion that a property is psychologically impacted, including that an occupant is or was suspected to be infected with HIV or was diagnosed with AIDS or another disease medically unlikely to be transmitted by occupancy, or that the property was or was suspected to have been the site of a suicide, homicide or other felony, is not a material fact that must be disclosed in a real estate transaction, and no claim arises against an owner, or a licensee assisting the owner, for failing to disclose it to a purchaser or lessee. One route exists and it binds a licensee rather than a landlord: where a purchaser or lessee making a bona fide offer tells the licensee assisting the owner in writing that knowledge of the factor matters to their decision, the licensee must ask the owner and report what they find, with the owner's consent and subject to privacy law, and must tell the purchaser or lessee if the owner refuses. A landlord renting without a licensee is untouched by it. The sale-side disclosure act expressly leaves this statute alone.

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

One section carries the whole roster, and it is bilateral in form: a rental agreement may not provide that either party does any of six things. The six are waiving or foregoing rights or remedies under the act, authorizing anyone to confess judgment on a claim arising out of the agreement, agreeing to pay the other party's attorney's fees, agreeing to exculpate, limit or indemnify liability for damages or injuries to persons or property caused by either party's acts or omissions in operating or maintaining the dwelling unit or the premises, agreeing to a lien in the other party's property beyond what the act allows, and agreeing to waive or limit the right to summon a peace officer or other emergency assistance in an emergency. The last was added in 2021 and is the only twenty-first-century item. Four of the six protect the tenant in practice; the fee and lien items cut both ways on their face. The roster is not spread across the code: no other void-clause provision exists in the title, and Oklahoma has no unconscionability section at all. Two general backstops sit behind it: any agreement is unenforceable to the extent it conflicts with the act, and any right or obligation under the act is enforceable in any court of appropriate jurisdiction, including small claims court.

Sanction as the statute states it: A prohibited provision included in a rental agreement is unenforceable, and that is the entire consequence: no damages figure, no multiple of the rent, no deliberate-use tier, no attempt-to-enforce trigger and no cure window.

The listed provisions:

• A provision that either party agrees to waive or forego rights or remedies under the Oklahoma Residential Landlord and Tenant Act.

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

• A provision that either party agrees to pay the other party's attorney's fees.

• A provision agreeing to the exculpation, limitation or indemnification of any liability arising under law for damages or injuries to persons or property caused by or resulting from the acts or omissions of either party, their agents, servants or employees in the operation or maintenance of the dwelling unit or the premises of which it is a part.

• A provision agreeing to the establishment of a lien in the other party's property, except as the act allows.

• A provision that either party agrees to waive or limit the right to summon a peace officer or other emergency assistance in an emergency.

Attorney fees go to the prevailing party by statute, whatever the lease says. Separately, a lease clause charging either party's attorney fees to the other is void, as the section cited states.

Two provisions work together and Oklahoma is unusual in having both. The clause is banned in both directions: a rental agreement may not provide that either party agrees to pay the other party's attorney's fees, and a provision that does is unenforceable. The statute then supplies fees instead and makes them mandatory: in any action for breach of a rental agreement, or to enforce any right or obligation provided for in the act, the prevailing party is entitled to reasonable attorney's fees. Nothing converts a one-way clause, because the clause is void outright, and the entitlement is not confined to named sections. There is no cap, no in-house-counsel limit and no pre-suit condition. The act names small claims court in terms and allows any right under it to be pursued inside an eviction action. One narrow exception sits elsewhere: in an eviction action based on a fraudulent assistance-animal accommodation claim, a prevailing landlord may be awarded court costs and fees plus damages of up to one thousand dollars, which is discretionary, one-way and confined to that section.