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

Landlord: 30 days. Tenant: the statute states no tenant period.

The 7-day and 30-day periods run forward from the day the written notice is served, and nothing in the section ties the ending date to a rental period, a rent-due date, or the first of a month, so the tenancy ends when the notice period runs out. The 60-day period for a tenancy from year to year works differently: it ends the tenancy at the end of the lease year, so the ending date is fixed by the year and the notice must be timed to reach it. That section also fixes a window for serving the notice, which may be given only within the four months before the last 60 days of the year, so a notice served too early is as ineffective as one served too late.

Whether the termination date must fall on a rental-period boundary or a rent-due date differs between tenancy types or is not settled by the statute; the rule for each is stated above.

Tiers: Four tracks. A tenancy from week to week takes 7 days' written notice. Any other tenancy for a term of less than one year, which is where a month-to-month tenancy sits, takes 30 days. A tenancy from year to year takes 60 days, ending the tenancy at the end of the year and served only within the four months preceding the last 60 days of that year. A landlord who took the property through a foreclosure, whether a mortgagee, a receiver, the holder of a certificate of sale or deed, or the purchaser at a judicial sale, must give at least 90 days' written notice to end a bona fide lease, and that 90-day floor reaches month-to-month and week-to-week tenancies as well as a lease running to its end date; it applies equally to a buyer at a judicial sale who intends to live in the unit.

The parties may agree to a different period. A lease may set its own arrangement. Both notice sections apply only where the tenant holds over without a special agreement, which leaves room for the parties to agree otherwise in writing, and no part of the eviction article carries a clause barring waiver of the notice periods. The one place the article does bar waiver is the farm-tenancy section, which says its notice may not be waived in a verbal lease, so the legislature bars waiver expressly when it means to. Whether a lease may cut the period to nothing has not been settled by an Illinois court.

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

Illinois has no single residential landlord-tenant act, and the notice periods sit in the eviction article of the Code of Civil Procedure, 735 ILCS 5, sections 9-205 and 9-207. The notice must be in writing. Section 9-207 gives the landlord 7 days to end a tenancy from week to week and 30 days to end any other tenancy for a term of less than one year, and section 9-205 gives 60 days to end a tenancy from year to year at the end of the year, to be served within the four months before the last 60 days of the year. Section 9-207.5 overrides both with a 90-day floor where the landlord came to the property through a foreclosure and the lease is bona fide. The periods are not symmetric. Section 9-207 says only that the landlord may terminate by giving them, and section 9-203 assumes a tenant's right to quit comes from the lease rather than from the statute, so a month-to-month tenant's notice is whatever the lease says; section 9-205, by contrast, is written without naming either party and its 60 days is available to both sides on its face. Oral tenancies are covered, because the article defines a lease as every letting whether by verbal or written agreement. Once a notice under either section has run, no further demand for possession is needed before the landlord files.

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

Local ordinances: no statute or decision addresses them. No Illinois statute either preempts or authorizes a local just-cause or eviction-control ordinance. The state's one express preemption in this area, the Rent Control Preemption Act at 50 ILCS 825, reaches only the amount of rent charged for private residential or commercial property, and its home-rule section is a denial of home-rule power on that subject alone; that rent posture is carried on the rent-increase page. Illinois preempts narrowly and by naming the subject when it means to, and it has not named the grounds for ending a tenancy. Where a local screening-fee policy conflicts with the Landlord and Tenant Act, 765 ILCS 705, section 30 makes the policy giving prospective tenants the greater protection control. City and county just-cause and notice ordinances are covered on the locality pages.

No reason is required to end a periodic tenancy in Illinois or to let a fixed term expire. The landlord gives the statutory notice and the tenancy ends, and holding possession after a tenancy has ended by its own terms or by a notice to quit is itself a ground for a possession order. Several statutes bar a termination for a particular reason without requiring a reason in general: the Landlord Retaliation Act, 765 ILCS 721, bars terminating a tenancy or refusing to renew in response to seven protected tenant activities and gives the tenant a one-year presumption; the eviction article gives a survivor of domestic or sexual violence a defense to a possession claim based on victim status; and the Immigrant Tenant Protection Act bars immigration-status harassment while stating expressly that it neither enlarges nor diminishes the landlord's right to end a tenancy under existing state or local law.

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

After the term, no statute governs conversion; the common-law rule applies. Nothing in the eviction article or the Landlord and Tenant Act converts a holdover into a month-to-month tenancy, and neither body of law ties a new tenancy to the landlord's acceptance of rent. What a holdover becomes when the landlord lets the tenant stay is settled by Illinois court decisions rather than by statute.

A fixed term expires on its ending date. The tenant is then bound to surrender possession, and no notice to quit and no demand of possession is necessary from either side, under 735 ILCS 5, section 9-213. The single exception is a landlord who took the property through a foreclosure, who must give at least 90 days' written notice even to end a bona fide lease at the end of its term. No Illinois landlord-tenant statute requires a reminder before an automatic-renewal clause takes effect. The general Automatic Contract Renewal Act, 815 ILCS 601, section 10, requires a written reminder between 30 and 60 days before the cancellation deadline on a consumer contract with a term of 12 months or more that renews automatically for a further term longer than one month, and its list of exclusions covers business-to-business contracts without excluding leases; whether it reaches a residential lease is unsettled, because the act speaks of selling products or services and because the common clause converting a lease to month-to-month renews for a term of exactly one month, below the act's threshold. No Illinois court has applied it to a lease.

A tenant who stays on after the tenancy has ended by its own terms, by a condition, or by a notice to quit holds possession without right, which is a ground for a possession order under 735 ILCS 5, section 9-102. Illinois statutes use no tenancy-at-sufferance label, and the word does not appear in the eviction article or the Landlord and Tenant Act. Once a termination notice has run its course the landlord needs no further demand before filing.

Damages: Illinois has two separate double-damages statutes and neither is automatic. Under 735 ILCS 5, section 9-202, a tenant who wilfully holds over after the term ends, and does so after the landlord has made a written demand for possession, pays at the rate of double the yearly value of the property for the time the owner is kept out of possession. Both conditions are on the face of the section: the holding over must be wilful and the written demand must come first, and the measure is double the yearly value of the property rather than double the contract rent. Under section 9-203, a tenant who gives notice of an intention to quit at a time the lease gave a right to quit, and then does not leave, pays double the rent that would otherwise be due, collected the same way the rent would have been; that measure carries no wilfulness element and no demand requirement, but it reaches only the tenant who gave the notice. A holdover that fits neither section carries no statutory enhancement.

Yes: a statute imposes the duty.

When it attaches: The statute conditions the duty on nothing but a defaulting lessee, so it attaches whenever the landlord seeks damages from a tenant who has broken the lease, including a tenant who simply leaves early. There is no requirement that the unit be abandoned first and no election the landlord must make.

Burden of proof: on the landlord.

The standard: The landlord must take reasonable measures to mitigate the damages recoverable against the defaulting tenant. What counts as reasonable is not defined by the statute. The landlord carries the burden of establishing that the duty was met, because the landlord is in the best position to prove compliance and a tenant would otherwise face proving a negative, and mitigation is not an affirmative defense the tenant must plead; a landlord who offers no evidence of mitigation has not proved the damages claim.

No authority addresses a clause accelerating the remaining rent.

Whether a lease may waive the duty is not settled.

Illinois imposes the duty by one short statute, 735 ILCS 5, section 9-213.1, which has said since 1984 that a landlord or the landlord's agent shall take reasonable measures to mitigate the damages recoverable against a defaulting lessee. It has never been amended. The duty reaches any defaulting tenant, not only one who abandons the unit, and the statute is not limited to residential leases. The Appellate Court settled in 1994 that the landlord, not the tenant, must establish mitigation, and that it is not a defense the tenant has to plead in advance. Nothing in the statute or in the eviction article addresses a lease clause accelerating the remaining rent, and no Illinois decision found on this question voids one. The statute carries no clause barring waiver, and whether a lease may waive the duty has not been settled by an Illinois court; that is a real gap, and it stands out because the Safe Homes Act and the Immigrant Tenant Protection Act both say expressly that their protections cannot be waived in a lease.

No statute addresses a fee a landlord may charge for ending a lease early; the general damages rules govern.

No Illinois statute in force today authorizes, caps, or bars a fee for ending a residential lease early, and none caps the damages a landlord may recover after an early departure. The general damages rules govern instead, which in Illinois means the landlord must take reasonable measures to mitigate and must prove having done so. The fee rules that are in force reach other charges: a landlord using a third-party payment portal that charges a transaction fee must allow payment by paper check or cash, a landlord may not require rent to be paid by electronic funds transfer, and a landlord may not charge an application screening fee when the applicant supplies a qualifying reusable screening report. A separate rental-fee transparency and junk-fee section takes effect on January 1, 2027 and is described under coming changes; it will require every non-optional fee to appear on the first page of the lease, which reaches an early-termination fee, but it does not name one. This answer rests on the statutes rather than on Illinois administrative rules; the Illinois Administrative Code is published by the Secretary of State, no Illinois agency is charged with regulating residential lease fees, and the enforcement route the legislature chose is the Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act together with a private right of action.

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

Domestic violence and related grounds: no right to quit, but victim status is a defense or release when the landlord sues for rent.

Who qualifies: The tenant or a member of the tenant's household. Domestic violence takes its meaning from the Illinois Domestic Violence Act of 1986, which requires abuse by a family or household member. Sexual violence is defined broadly and expressly includes stalking and aggravated stalking alongside sexual assault and sexual abuse of an adult or a minor child. Human trafficking is not a covered ground; the word does not appear in the act. Dating violence appears in the act's statement of purpose but not in the trigger for the defense itself.

Separate schemes: The act runs two tracks with different triggers. The first is available where, at the time the tenant vacated, the tenant or a household member was under a credible imminent threat of domestic or sexual violence at the premises; it looks at a present danger rather than a past incident, and requires no supporting document. The second is available where the tenant or a household member was a victim of sexual violence on premises owned or controlled by the landlord and vacated as a result; it requires supporting evidence, and the incident must fall inside a 60-day window.

Documentation: The first track requires no document at all. The tenant gives written notice and, if the landlord sues for rent, proves the credible imminent threat in court on the balance of the evidence. The second track requires the written notice to give the date of the sexual violence and to be accompanied by at least one of two kinds of proof: medical, court, or police evidence of the sexual violence, or a statement from an employee of a victim services or rape crisis organization from which the tenant or a household member sought services. Either one is enough; the tenant does not have to supply both.

Window: 60 days; the incident or documentation must fall within that window before the notice. The 60 days belongs to the sexual-violence track only: the violence must have happened no more than 60 days before the written notice was given. The act extends that window where the tenant cannot reasonably give notice for reasons related to the sexual violence, such as being in hospital or seeking shelter or counseling, in which case notice is due as soon afterwards as is practicable. The credible-imminent-threat track has no window, because its trigger is a danger existing at the time the tenant leaves rather than an incident in the past.

Notice: There is no notice period, because this is not a right to end the tenancy on a future date. The written notice is due before the tenant vacates or within three days after, and it fixes the point from which rent stops accruing rather than an ending date. On the credible-imminent-threat track the notice must say that the reason for leaving was a credible imminent threat of domestic or sexual violence; on the sexual-violence track it must also give the date of the violence and come with the supporting evidence.

Rent owed: The tenant is not liable for rent for the period after vacating, once the conditions are met. Rent that accrued before the tenant vacated and gave notice stays due, and the act says twice that it is no defense to a claim for that earlier rent. Nothing in the act addresses prepaid rent.

Cost to the tenant: The act imposes no fee or penalty for leaving and forgives nothing beyond rent for the period after the tenant vacates. A landlord who changes the locks under the act may charge for the expense, but the charge must not exceed the reasonable price customarily charged for changing a lock. The act says nothing about the security deposit, which is a real silence: the deposit is handled under the ordinary deposit rules.

Other tenants on the lease: the statute is silent on the other tenants.

Locks: The victim may require the landlord to change the locks. All tenants who signed the lease must join in a written request stating that one of them, or a household member, is under a credible imminent threat of domestic or sexual violence at the premises. Where the threat comes from someone who is not on the lease, the request must carry one of the same forms of evidence the sexual-violence track accepts. Where the threat comes from someone who is on the lease, or where the lease is oral, the request must carry a plenary order of protection or a plenary civil no contact order granting the tenant exclusive possession of the premises, and the tenant does not need the other person's consent. The landlord then has 48 hours to change the locks or to let the tenant change them, and must make a good-faith effort to get a key to the tenant as soon as possible and no more than 48 hours after the change. A landlord who misses the 48 hours loses the choice: the tenant may change the locks without permission, using locks of similar or better quality, and must give the landlord a key within 48 hours. The landlord may charge no more than the price customarily charged for a lock change, and a landlord who complies is not liable to anyone else who is left unable to get in. The act's own injunction and fee remedies are the only remedies for a breach of these lock provisions.

Later screening: more than one form of protection. Two separate statutes protect a tenant who used the act. Under 765 ILCS 750, section 27, a landlord may not tell a prospective landlord that a tenant or a household member exercised rights under the act, or pass on any information the tenant supplied in doing so, unless the tenant consents in writing, the disclosure is required by law, or it is part of a civil proceeding under the act; a landlord who breaches it is liable for actual damages up to $2,000 plus fees. Separately, the Illinois Human Rights Act makes order of protection status a protected class and makes it a civil rights violation to refuse a real estate transaction, to deny property, or to alter the terms of a transaction on that basis, which reaches applicants as well as sitting tenants.

The landlord must keep the victim's documentation or status confidential.

The landlord's side: The landlord may require the supporting evidence the second track calls for, and on the lock-change side may require the plenary order where the threat comes from a co-tenant or the lease is oral. On the possession side, the eviction article lets the landlord proceed against the person who committed the violence alone, against the whole household where the victim's continued tenancy would pose an actual and imminent threat to other tenants, household members, the landlord, or the landlord's agents, and against a victim who committed the criminal activity relied on. The landlord may also bar a person who is not a tenant from the premises by written notice to the tenant, with criminal trespass consequences for a return.

Lease disclosure: Yes, and it is new. Since January 1, 2026 the Summary of Rights for Safer Homes Act, 765 ILCS 752, requires a landlord to attach the Department of Human Rights' summary of survivors' housing rights as the first page of any written residential lease, for a new rental or a renewal, and to obtain each tenant's signature in the acknowledgment at the bottom of every page of the summary. Missing signatures create a rebuttable presumption that the landlord did not comply. A landlord who does not comply owes the tenant the greater of actual damages up to $2,000 or $100, plus court costs and reasonable attorney's fees, and the tenant does not have to go through the Department first. The act reaches written leases only, because it defines a tenant as a person who has entered a written lease.

Illinois does not give a survivor a right to end the lease on notice. What the Safe Homes Act, 765 ILCS 750, gives is a defense: a tenant who has already left is not liable for rent for the period after vacating if the tenant gave written notice before leaving or within three days after, and if the court is satisfied on the balance of the evidence either that the tenant or a household member was under a credible imminent threat of domestic or sexual violence at the premises when the tenant left, or that the tenant or a household member was a victim of sexual violence on premises the landlord owns or controls, within the past 60 days, supported by medical, court, or police evidence or a statement from a victim services or rape crisis worker. The word terminate appears nowhere in the act. Alongside the defense the act gives a lock-change right on 48 hours, bars a landlord from telling a prospective landlord that the tenant used the act, and cannot be waived or modified by a lease or a side agreement. It does not apply to public housing assisted under the United States Housing Act of 1937, including mixed-finance units assisted with housing authority funds, except that tenants in the tenant-based Housing Choice Voucher program stay inside it. The act says nothing about co-tenants and nothing about the security deposit.

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

When the state rights attach: The right to end a lease on entering military service applies to leases executed on or after January 1, 2013. The Illinois Service Member Civil Relief Act adds that a termination by the service member or the service member's spouse works through the same section for a lease entered into on or after that act's effective date.

Illinois adds three things to the federal Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, in 765 ILCS 705, section 16. The threshold is lower: a tenant who enters military service for more than 29 consecutive days after signing the lease may end it, where the federal act's own trigger for a serving tenant is a permanent change of station or a deployment of at least 90 days; those federal triggers are also written into the Illinois section and work whenever the lease was signed. The right is not the service member's alone: any member of the tenant's family who lives with the tenant at the premises may end the lease in their own right, and the Illinois Service Member Civil Relief Act adds the service member's spouse. And the coverage is wider than the federal act's, because military service means any full-time training or duty ordered by the President, by the Governor of a state, or by another appropriate military authority, and a service member means an Illinois resident in any component of the armed forces or in the National Guard of any state. The tenant supplies a copy of the orders and of any orders extending the service. The termination takes effect 30 days after the notice is delivered, or, where rent is paid monthly, 30 days after the next rent due date following the notice. The landlord must return any unearned advance rent and the security deposit, less actual damages or repairs provided for in the lease. Refusing to accept a valid termination is a civil rights violation under the Illinois Human Rights Act, and penalties go to the Illinois Military Family Relief Fund. The section reaches a mobile home lot as well as residential, non-residential, and farm property.

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

Other grounds: Illinois has one statutory ground outside the survivor and military tracks, and it is recent. Under 765 ILCS 705, section 25, a landlord must disclose in writing, before signing and again in the lease or renewal, that the property sits in the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Special Flood Hazard Area, and must give a flooding history for a garden-level, basement-level, or first-floor unit. A landlord who fails to make that disclosure gives the tenant two ways out. The tenant who later learns of the failure may end the lease by written notice given no later than the 30th day after becoming aware of it, and the landlord must return all rent and fees paid in advance within 15 days. If a disclosure failure is followed by flooding that damages the tenant's property, affects habitability, or affects access to the unit, the tenant may end the lease by written notice within 30 days of the flood on the same refund terms and may also sue for the property lost or damaged. Farm leases, concession leases, and property owned or managed by the Department of Natural Resources are exempt. One express negative is worth knowing: where a landlord who lives at the property turns out to be a child sex offender, a tenant who did not tell the landlord of being the parent or guardian of a child under 18 may not end the lease on that discovery, and the lease stays in full force. Ending a lease because the landlord failed to repair, and the tenant's remedy for a retaliatory termination, are covered on the habitability page.

No statute treats absence as ending the tenancy; the common law governs.

Illinois has no residential abandonment statute. No provision deems a tenancy ended after a stated absence, there is no notice of belief of abandonment for the landlord to serve, and there is no window in which the tenant answers one. The only section in the eviction article with abandonment in its title, section 9-318, sits in the distress-for-rent part and lets a landlord seize and harvest crops on farmland the tenant has left, with a right for the tenant to redeem them; it does not end a tenancy. A landlord whose residential tenant disappears therefore uses the ordinary routes: the notice that ends a periodic tenancy, the five-day demand for unpaid rent, or a possession claim once the tenancy has ended by its own terms. The duty to take reasonable measures to mitigate applies to the departed tenant's remaining liability. No Illinois statute says what a landlord may do with property a residential tenant leaves behind, and that gap should not be filled by inference.

One section, 735 ILCS 5, section 9-211, covers both demands and termination notices, and it gives four routes in its own order. The notice may be delivered personally to the tenant as a written or printed copy, or partly written and partly printed. It may be left with a person aged 13 or older who lives on the premises or is in possession of them, which is a lower age floor than most states use. It may be sent by certified or registered mail with a return receipt from the addressee, so an unclaimed letter does not complete service. And it may be posted on the premises, but only where nobody is in actual possession. A notice served by an officer authorized to serve process carries the officer's return as prima facie evidence of what it states, and a notice served by anyone else has the same effect once that person swears to the return.

Electronic delivery: the statute lists the permitted methods and excludes it.

What the notice must contain: A notice ending a periodic tenancy must be in writing and nothing more: there is no statutory form, no requirement to state a ground, and no advisory language. The contrast on the for-cause side is deliberate. A five-day demand for unpaid rent must prominently carry a warning that only full payment of the rent demanded waives the landlord's right to terminate, unless the landlord agrees in writing to continue the lease for a partial payment, and the farm-tenancy notice to quit has a statutory form.

Illinois writes around the federal rules by cross-reference rather than by restating them. The Safe Homes Act steps back from public housing assisted under the United States Housing Act of 1937, keeping tenant-based Housing Choice Voucher tenants inside it, so a public-housing survivor is protected by the federal scheme rather than by the state one. The 90-day notice a foreclosure successor owes a bona fide lease, in 735 ILCS 5, section 9-207.5, is drafted from the same template as the federal Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act and runs in parallel with it, but it stands on its own and cites no federal statute. The state military termination right and the Illinois Service Member Civil Relief Act sit on top of the federal Servicemembers Civil Relief Act without citing it. Illinois has written no version of the federal 30-day notice for covered dwellings into its own code.

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 Illinois appellate decision construes the CARES Act's 30-day notice provision. A landlord of a covered dwelling in Illinois is therefore working from the federal text itself, with no state ruling on whether the 30 days reaches grounds other than nonpayment. (Appellate picture read as of September 3, 2026.)

Snyder v. Ambrose, 266 Ill. App. 3d 163, 639 N.E.2d 639, 203 Ill. Dec. 319 (Ill. App. Ct. 2d Dist. 1994) (Illinois Appellate Court, Second District; a general statement of law; bears on the duty to re-let): Treating the question as one of first impression, the court held that the burden of establishing mitigation of damages under the statutory duty in 735 ILCS 5, section 9-213.1, falls on the landlord, because the landlord is best placed to prove compliance while the tenant would face proving that reasonable efforts were not made; it departed from a 1911 decision that had put the burden on the tenant. The court also held that mitigation is not an affirmative defense the tenant must plead, so excluding the tenant's evidence on that ground was prejudicial error, and it reversed because the landlord offered no evidence of mitigation. The opinion describes the agreement only as one to rent real estate and never says whether the property was a home or a business, so the holding is a general reading of a statute that is itself not limited to residential leases.

Stein v. Spainhour, 167 Ill. App. 3d 555, 521 N.E.2d 641 (Ill. App. Ct. 1988) (Illinois Appellate Court; arose from a commercial lease; bears on the duty to re-let): The court applied the statutory duty to mitigate in 735 ILCS 5, section 9-213.1, to a commercial lease and reviewed the computation of the landlord's damages, but it did not decide which party bears the burden of proving mitigation. The case arose from a commercial lease, so it is included for the statute's reach and the damages measure rather than for any residential holding.