How does a Florida landlord lawfully end a tenancy, and when may a tenant leave early?

Landlord: 30 days (given before the end of a rental period). Tenant: 30 days.

The period is counted backwards from the end of a rental period, not forwards from delivery. The statute requires the notice to be given not less than the stated number of days prior to the end of a period, so a monthly notice served on the twentieth cannot end the tenancy on the twentieth of the next month: it has to allow thirty clear days before a period ends, which in practice pushes the ending to the close of the period after next. The tenancy always ends on a period boundary.

The termination date must fall on a rental-period boundary or a rent-due date.

Tiers: The period turns on how long the rental period is. Seven days for a tenancy from week to week, thirty days for a tenancy from month to month, thirty days for a tenancy from quarter to quarter, and sixty days for a tenancy from year to year, in each case before the end of one of those periods. Where the agreement says nothing about duration, the period is set by how the rent is payable: rent payable weekly makes the tenancy weekly, monthly makes it monthly, quarterly makes it quarterly and yearly makes it yearly. The same rule applies to housing that goes with a job and carries no rent, where wages paid weekly or more often make the tenancy weekly and wages paid monthly, or no wages, make it monthly. Nothing turns on how long the tenant has lived there, the type of building, how many units the landlord owns, or where in the state the home is.

A lease may not change the period. A provision in a rental agreement is void and unenforceable to the extent that it purports to waive or preclude the rights, remedies or requirements set out in part II (section 83.47, subsection (1)(a)). The termination-notice section sits inside part II, so its periods are a floor for both sides rather than a default a lease can shorten. The separate non-waiver sentence attached to the delivery rules covers only the notices that end a tenancy for cause, so it is the general clause, not that sentence, that protects the no-cause period.

A statute requires the landlord's and tenant's periods to be equal, or bars a lease from imposing a longer period on one side.

Source of the period: a termination-notice statute states it.

Either party may end a tenancy that has no fixed duration by giving written notice, and the same figures apply in both directions because a single sentence covers both: seven days before the end of a weekly period, thirty days before the end of a monthly period, thirty days before the end of a quarterly period, and sixty days before the end of an annual period. The notice is delivered the same way a notice ending a tenancy for cause is delivered, so it may be mailed, handed over as a true copy, emailed where both parties have signed the electronic-delivery addendum, or left at the home if the tenant is away. No reason has to be given and the statute prescribes no form. The widely repeated fifteen-day figure for a monthly tenancy is real but belongs to part I of the chapter, which applies only to nonresidential tenancies and tenancies part II does not govern; the residential figure has been thirty days since July 1, 2023.

No: no statewide rule requires a reason, and no statute expressly authorizes local ordinances.

Local just-cause or eviction-control ordinances: expressly preempted by statute. Florida preempts the field by statute. Section 83.425 provides that the regulation of residential tenancies, the landlord-tenant relationship and all other matters covered under part II are preempted to the state, and that the section supersedes any local government regulation on those matters, expressly including the screening process, security deposits, rental applications and their fees, the terms and conditions of rental agreements, the rights and responsibilities of landlord and tenant, disclosures, fees charged by the landlord, and notice requirements. A city or county cannot require a reason to end a tenancy or lengthen the notice the state sets. Rent regulation is preempted separately and independently, and that posture is carried on the rent-increase page.

No reason is required to end a periodic tenancy or to let a fixed term expire in Florida. Nothing in part II conditions a termination or a refusal to renew on a ground, and since July 1, 2023 no local government may impose such a condition either. The one statutory limit on a landlord's motive is the retaliation section, which makes it a defense for the tenant if the landlord's primary motive was the tenant's complaint to a code authority, participation in a tenants' organization, exercise of a legal right, a paid-in-full rent record, or the tenant's having ended a rental agreement as a service member; that section expressly does not apply where the landlord proves good cause for the eviction, and it is a defense rather than a requirement. Retaliation is covered on the habitability page.

The term ends on its date; no statute requires notice from either side.

After the term, nothing converts: a holdover creates no new tenancy. Part II converts nothing by its own force. A tenant who stays without the landlord's permission is dealt with by the double-rent section and a possession case. A tenant who stays with the landlord's permission after a periodic tenancy, and who did not give the thirty days' notice the termination section requires, owes the landlord an additional one month's rent. If the parties simply carry on, the length of the new tenancy is set by how the rent is payable. The tenancy-at-sufferance label and the conversion-on-written-consent rule that appear elsewhere in the chapter belong to part I and do not reach a home.

A fixed-term lease ends on its own date, and neither side owes the other statutory notice. What the statute does instead is limit what a lease may require: a lease may make the tenant give notice before moving out at the end of the term only if it also requires the landlord to give notice, delivered the same way, within the same window, when the lease will not be renewed, and the window it sets may be no shorter than thirty days and no longer than sixty days from either side. So a Florida non-renewal notice is a creature of the lease, never of the statute. A lease may also make the tenant liable for liquidated damages for missing that notice, but only if the landlord first serves a written notice, delivered by the statutory methods, within fifteen days before the notice window opens, setting out what the tenant must do, the date the agreement ends, and every fee, penalty and other charge that may follow. Florida has no statute requiring a reminder before an automatic-renewal clause takes effect; the state's renewal-notice law for service contracts does not reach a lease.

Part II gives the holding-over tenant no label and creates no new tenancy. What it says is operational: where the tenant stays after the agreement ends without the landlord's permission, the landlord recovers possession through the summary possession action, which is covered on the eviction page. The tenancy-at-sufferance description that circulates for Florida comes from part I of the chapter and applies to nonresidential tenancies.

Damages: Double rent for the holdover period.

Where the tenant stays after the rental agreement ends without the landlord's permission, the landlord may recover double the amount of rent due on the dwelling unit for the period during which the tenant refuses to give up possession, on top of possession itself. The doubling is unconditional on the face of the statute: there is no wilfulness element, no bad-faith test and no demand the landlord must make first, which is unusual and is the opposite of the nonresidential rule in the same chapter, where the landlord must demand double rent. Where the tenant stays with the landlord's permission after a periodic tenancy and did not give the required thirty days' notice, the charge is different and much smaller: an additional one month's rent, once.

No duty: a statute lets the landlord elect to hold the tenant liable without re-letting.

When it attaches: The choice of remedies, and with it any duty to re-let, opens only once the landlord has obtained a writ of possession, the tenant has given up possession, or the tenant has abandoned the home. Until one of those three things has happened the landlord has no claim under the section at all, and an appellate court has held that obtaining the writ is a prerequisite to standing by and doing nothing where eviction proceedings are contemplated. A landlord's conduct is what shows which choice was made: a landlord who retakes the home for its own account and never tells the tenant it will be held to the lease has chosen to end the tenant's liability.

The standard: The standard applies only where the landlord takes back the home for the tenant's account. There the landlord has a duty to act in good faith in attempting to re-let, which the statute defines: the landlord must use at least the same efforts as were used in the initial rental, or at least the same efforts used in renting other similar units, but is not required to give the empty home a preference over the landlord's other vacant units. Rent received from re-letting is deducted from the balance the tenant owes.

A statutory early-termination fee or liquidated-damages election displaces the duty for a landlord who takes the fee.

A lease clause accelerating all remaining rent on default is void.

The lease may not waive the duty.

Florida does not require a landlord to re-let. When a tenant breaches the agreement and the landlord has a writ of possession, or the tenant has given up possession or abandoned the home, the landlord picks one of four courses: end the agreement and take the home back for the landlord's own account, which also ends the tenant's further liability; take it back for the tenant's account and hold the tenant liable for the difference between the agreed rent and what re-letting brings in, which is the only course carrying the good-faith re-letting duty; stand by and do nothing, holding the tenant liable for rent as it comes due; or charge the agreed early-termination fee or liquidated damages. So the common claim that a Florida landlord must reduce the loss is wrong: one of the four choices is expressly to do nothing. Neither the section nor the surrounding sections say who must prove what, and no decision allocates the burden. An appellate court has held that the section sets out the total universe of choices open to a landlord and displaces the common law, so a lease clause that creates a different remedy, including one accelerating the rest of the rent or fixing liquidated damages outside the statutory addendum, does not survive; and a clause letting the landlord choose between a stipulated sum and actual damages is a penalty as a matter of law. A lease may not waive the rights, remedies or requirements the part sets out.

A statute caps what an early-termination fee may be.

The cap: An early-termination fee or liquidated-damages sum may not exceed two months' rent, and the remedy exists only if the landlord and tenant agreed to it when the rental agreement was made, by the tenant signing a separate addendum to the lease, not a paragraph inside it, containing the statutory two-box choice. Where the fee route is used, the lease may not require the tenant to give more than sixty days' notice before the proposed termination date. The consideration running the other way is that the landlord waives the right to seek any rent beyond the month in which it takes the home back, though it keeps rent and other charges accrued through that month and charges for damage. The statute says only two months' rent and fixes a dollar figure written into the addendum at signing; it does not say whether the ceiling is measured against the rent at signing or the rent at termination, and no decision resolves it. The fee route is unavailable where the tenant's breach is a failure to give the end-of-term notice the lease required.

Florida is one of the few states with a hard ceiling on what a tenant pays to leave early, and the conditions matter as much as the number. The defined term is narrow: an early-termination fee is a charge, fee or forfeiture set out in a written rental agreement and assessed when a tenant elects to end the agreement and moves out before the end of the term, and it expressly does not include unpaid rent and other accrued charges through the month in which the landlord takes the home back, charges for damage, or charges tied to a settlement, release, buyout or accord and satisfaction. That last exclusion is the one both sides get wrong: a buyout negotiated after the fact sits outside the definition and outside the two-month ceiling. A lease that fixes liquidated damages without the separate signed addendum does not work at all, and an appellate court struck a form clause charging three months' rent on any early departure. A clause giving the landlord a choice between the stipulated sum and actual damages is a penalty as a matter of law. Where no addendum was signed, the tenant's exposure is set by whichever of the landlord's other three courses the landlord takes.

Early-exit rights by ground: domestic violence and related grounds, no statute; military service beyond the federal act, state orders or National Guard duty are covered, a deployment or transfer threshold below the federal act's, a spouse or dependent may terminate in their own right, and termination takes effect sooner than under the federal act; death of the tenant, no statute; and other statutory grounds.

Domestic violence and related grounds: no statute gives a victim a right to end the lease early.

Florida gives a victim of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual violence, stalking or human trafficking no right to end a lease early. Part II of chapter 83 contains no such provision; the only place any of those words appears in the part is the background-screening list for apartment employees. The domestic-violence chapter, the assault and stalking chapter and the human-trafficking chapter contain no reference to a landlord, a tenancy, a rental agreement or a dwelling unit. The one housing power in the domestic-violence chapter belongs to the court issuing an injunction, which may award the petitioner temporary exclusive use and possession of a shared dwelling or exclude the respondent from the petitioner's residence; that allocates the home between the two people and creates nothing against the landlord and does not end the tenancy. Nothing bars a landlord from ending a tenancy because of victim status either. A tenant in this position is left with whatever the lease provides, an early-termination fee addendum if one was signed at the start, or the landlord's own choice of remedies, under which the landlord may lawfully stand by and hold the tenant to the rent.

Military service: State orders or National Guard duty are covered; a deployment or transfer threshold below the federal act's; a spouse or dependent may terminate in their own right; and termination takes effect sooner than under the federal act.

When the state rights attach: The rights run to a service member, meaning a member of the United States armed forces on active duty or on state active duty and every member of the Florida National Guard and the United States reserve forces. State active duty means full-time service in the active military service of Florida ordered by the Governor or the Adjutant General. Five of the six triggers require the lease to have been signed before the orders arrived; one applies where the tenant leased the home while already on duty and the home is thirty-five miles or more from the home of record. The rights may not be waived or modified by agreement of the parties under any circumstances.

Florida's service-member section is one of the broadest in the country and it cannot be contracted away. A service member ends the lease by giving the landlord written notice stating an effective date at least thirty days after the landlord receives it, if any one of six things is true: permanent change of station orders requiring a move of thirty-five miles or more from the home; premature or involuntary discharge or release from active duty or state active duty; release from active duty or state active duty where the home was leased while on duty and sits thirty-five miles or more from the home of record; military orders after the lease to move into government quarters, or eligibility for and a choice to move into them, expressly including privatized military housing run by a private company; temporary duty, temporary change of station or state active duty orders to somewhere thirty-five miles or more away for a period longer than sixty days; or a change of orders received after signing but before taking possession, again to somewhere thirty-five miles or more away. The notice must come with either a copy of the official orders or written verification signed by the commanding officer. If the service member dies on active duty, an adult member of the immediate family may end the lease the same way, adding the death certificate. The tenant then owes rent prorated to the effective date, payable when the lease would have required it, and owes no other rent or damages for the early ending; and where the tenant ends the lease fourteen or more days before occupancy, no damages or penalties of any kind may be assessed. It is also unlawful retaliation for a landlord to act against a tenant primarily because the tenant is a service member who ended a rental agreement this way. Three of the triggers reach state active duty, the sixty-day threshold is lower than the federal act's ninety days, the family right on a death in service has no federal counterpart, and the notice can take effect sooner than the federal act's next-rental-period timetable.

Death of the tenant: No statute gives a right to end the lease on the tenant's death.

Other grounds: Florida gives a tenant two statutory exits beyond the service-member section. The first is casualty: where the home is damaged or destroyed other than by the tenant's own wrongful or negligent act so that enjoyment of it is substantially impaired, the tenant may end the agreement and move out immediately, with no notice period and no waiting period, or may vacate only the unusable part and have the rent reduced by the fair rental value of that part. Where the agreement is ended this way the landlord handles the deposit under the ordinary deposit rules, and since June 26, 2025 the tenant must be given either the chance to collect belongings when it is safe to do so or notice of a date, within a reasonable time, by which they can be collected. The second is the habitability route, which runs through the seven-day notice to the landlord and is covered on the habitability page. There is no senior or care-facility ground, no disability or serious-illness ground, no job-transfer ground, no landlord-harassment ground and no crime-victim ground. One further section is worth knowing about because it is printed in the statutes and reads like a right that does not exist: the foreclosure section 83.5615, which would give a tenant a ninety-day notice against a purchaser at a foreclosure sale, was enacted to take effect only if Congress repealed the federal Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act. Congress did the opposite, repealing that act's sunset and restoring it, so the Florida section has never come into force, and Florida's earlier foreclosure section was repealed outright in 2020. A Florida tenant at foreclosure relies on the federal ninety-day notice.

Absence for a stated period ends the tenancy by presumption.

Where the landlord has no actual knowledge one way or the other, the tenant is presumed to have abandoned the home after being absent for a time equal to one-half the interval between rent payments. The statute states no day count: it states that fraction, so on a monthly tenancy it is about half a month, which is the figure shown here; on a weekly tenancy it is about half a week, and on a quarterly tenancy about half a quarter. Two things stop the presumption arising at all: the rent is current, or the tenant has told the landlord in writing about an intended absence. Nothing is served on the tenant, so there is no notice of belief of abandonment and no window in which to answer one. What the presumption does is let the landlord recover possession without a court case, and it is one of the three events that open the landlord's choice of remedies against a tenant who has gone. The nonresidential rule elsewhere in the chapter, which needs thirty consecutive days of absence plus unpaid rent plus a served notice, does not apply to a home. Where the last remaining tenant has died, a separate route lets the landlord recover possession once sixty days have passed, belongings remain, rent is unpaid and no one has told the landlord in writing of a probate estate or a personal representative; it does not apply to homes in several federally administered or regulated housing programs. What may be done with property left behind is covered separately from this page.

The termination section does not carry its own delivery rule; it sends the reader to the delivery rule for notices ending a tenancy for cause. A written notice is delivered by mailing it, by delivering a true copy, by emailing it in accordance with the electronic-delivery section, or, if the tenant is away from the home, by leaving a copy at the residence. No sheriff or process server is needed for a termination notice; an officer serves only the summons in a possession case, which is covered on the eviction page.

Electronic delivery: only with written consent, a read receipt, or a lease clause.

What the notice must contain: For a no-cause termination the only content the statute requires is that the notice be in writing and give the full period, ending at the close of a rental period. There is no statutory form, no requirement to state a reason and no advisory language. The statutory forms that circulate for Florida belong to the notices that end a tenancy for cause and are covered on the eviction page. No provision in part II adds days when a notice is mailed, and the part has no computation-of-time section at all.

Florida has one federal interaction unusual enough to state plainly: its own foreclosure-tenancy statute is switched off by federal law. The older section was repealed outright on July 1, 2020, and the replacement section 83.5615 was enacted to take effect only upon the repeal of the federal Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act. Congress instead repealed that act's sunset and restored it, so the trigger has never occurred and the Florida section, though printed in the statutes, has never been in force. The operative rule for a Florida tenant whose home is foreclosed is the federal ninety-day notice. Two further federal carve-outs sit inside the sections this page relies on: the route letting a landlord recover possession sixty days after the death of the last remaining tenant does not apply to homes in several federally administered or regulated housing programs, and the state military code provides that where any other law conflicts with the federal service-member or employment-rights acts or with that code, whichever applies controls.

The federal CARES Act 30-day notice to vacate for covered properties, as read in this state's courts: no state appellate decision construes it. No Florida appellate decision construes the federal thirty-day notice for covered dwellings. No Florida court has held whether the thirty-day notice survives or what grounds it reaches, so a reader should treat the federal requirement as a federal question in Florida rather than one Florida courts have answered. (Appellate picture read as of September 2, 2026.)

Olen Properties Corp. v. Moss, 984 So. 2d 558 (District Court of Appeal of Florida, Fourth District, 2008; residential lease; bears on early-termination fees): A form residential lease clause charging every tenant who left early an amount equal to three months' rent as liquidated damages was struck down. The statute setting out the landlord's choice of remedies is the total universe of choices open to a landlord when a tenant has not completed the term, and it does not allow a liquidated-damages remedy to be created around it. The court drew the other line too: a voluntary cancellation option, under which a tenant could end the tenancy on stated conditions for one month's rent and nothing more, is lawful, because that is not a surrender, an abandonment or a writ-of-possession situation.

Lefemine v. Baron, 573 So. 2d 326 (Supreme Court of Florida, 1991; a general statement of law; bears on early-termination fees): A default provision that let the injured party keep a stipulated sum or instead sue for actual damages was not enforceable as a liquidated-damages clause; the existence of the option negated any intent to liquidate damages, making the provision a penalty as a matter of law. The case arose from a contract to buy a home rather than from a lease, and it reaches leases because the Fourth District applied it to a residential lease's early-departure clause.

The Duffner Family 2012 Irrevocable Trust v. The Lee R. Duffner Revocable Living Trust, No. 3D23-1626, decided July 31, 2024 (District Court of Appeal of Florida, Third District; a general statement of law; bears on the duty to re-let): The statutory choice of remedies displaces the common law and sets out the total universe of choices open to a landlord. Abandonment, a surrender of possession, or obtaining a writ of possession is a prerequisite to suing at all, and where eviction proceedings are contemplated obtaining the writ is a prerequisite to standing by and doing nothing. This is the current appellate statement of how the section's opening gate works.

Atlantis Estate Acquisitions, Inc. v. DePierro, 125 So. 3d 889 (District Court of Appeal of Florida, Fourth District, 2013; residential lease; bears on the duty to re-let): A landlord's conduct shows which of the statutory choices it made. Ending the agreement and retaking the home for the landlord's own account also ends the tenant's further liability under the rental agreement, and a landlord who never told the tenant it would be held to continuing obligations, and made no demand for payment until it filed a counterclaim, had made that choice whatever it later argued.