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

Landlord: 30 days. Tenant: 30 days.

One section carries two different anchors, keyed to the type of tenancy. For a month-to-month tenancy the 30 days run to the periodic rental date, meaning the date rent falls due, so the count is measured back from a rent-due date rather than from a date the party giving notice picks. For a week-to-week tenancy the seven days run forward to the termination date specified in the notice, so there the party giving notice chooses the date. Ohio has no rule requiring the tenancy to end at the close of a full rental period, and nothing in the chapter counts a notice as given later because it was mailed.

The termination date may fall on any day.

Tiers: Two periods, chosen by the length of the tenancy. A week-to-week tenancy takes at least seven days' notice, counted to the termination date the notice names. A month-to-month tenancy takes at least 30 days' notice before the periodic rental date. Nothing turns on how long the tenant has lived there, on the building, on how many units the landlord owns, or on where in Ohio the unit is.

A lease may not change the period. The answer sits outside the notice section, which is why it is easy to miss. Section 5321.13, subsection (A) says no provision of the chapter may be modified or waived by any oral or written agreement, with a single exception in subsection (F) that lets a landlord agree to take on a tenant's own maintenance duties. The termination section is a provision of the chapter, so its seven-day and 30-day periods can be neither shortened nor lengthened by the lease, in either direction. A lease clause requiring 60 days' notice from the tenant is unenforceable in Ohio.

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 the landlord or the tenant may end, or decline to renew, a week-to-week tenancy on at least seven days' notice given to the other before the termination date the notice names, and a month-to-month tenancy on at least 30 days' notice given before the periodic rental date. The same clause covers both parties and both actions, so a month-to-month non-renewal takes the same 30 days on the same anchor, and neither side owes more notice than the other. Neither period can be changed by agreement. The statute says only that notice is given to the other: it does not require writing, prescribe a delivery method, or state what the notice must contain. Two limits fix the section's reach. It does not apply to a termination based on breaking a condition of the rental agreement or a duty imposed by law, which is the eviction page's subject, except for the tenant's duty not to allow controlled-substance activity on the premises. And where the landlord has actual knowledge of, or reasonable cause to believe, such activity, the landlord must end the tenancy on three days' notice, and that notice must say the tenancy ends three days after it is given.

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

Local ordinances: the state chapter occupies the field of landlord-tenant regulation. Ohio occupies the field. No political subdivision may enact, adopt, renew, maintain, enforce or continue any charter provision, ordinance, resolution, rule or other measure that conflicts with the landlord-tenant chapter, or that regulates the rights and obligations of parties to a rental agreement that the chapter regulates, expressly including any imposition of rent control or rent stabilization. The General Assembly went further in a companion section and declared the chapter a statewide and comprehensive enactment regulating all aspects of the landlord-tenant relationship for residential premises. Because ending a periodic tenancy is regulated by the chapter, a city just-cause ordinance falls inside the occupied field even though no statute names just-cause measures. Three things are carved out: housing, building, health and safety codes; measures regulating rent for premises the subdivision itself owns or operates; and measures implementing a plan of voluntary incentives or agreements to increase or maintain the supply or improve the quality of residential premises, including community reinvestment incentives, tax abatements, tax-credit or bond financing, and local loans or grants. The rent axis is preempted on the same text and the rent-increase page carries it.

No reason is required to end a periodic tenancy in Ohio or to let a fixed term expire; the party gives the statutory notice and the tenancy ends. The words just cause appear nowhere in the landlord-tenant chapter, and the one use of good cause is a standard for continuing a trial. The eviction chapter allows a possession action against tenants holding over their terms with no ground element at all. The chapter does regulate one landlord-side ground: a landlord may end a tenancy where a person on the state sex-offender or child-victim-offender registry occupies premises within 1,000 feet of a school, preschool, child day-care center, children's crisis care facility or residential infant care center, and a landlord who chooses not to act on it is protected from tort liability. Protection against retaliation is a separate section and 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. No Ohio statute converts a holdover into a periodic tenancy. There is no presumption of renewal and no rule that accepting rent creates a new term. What a holdover becomes in Ohio is a question of common law rather than statute, and the landlord's alternative is a possession action against a tenant holding over the term.

A fixed-term Ohio lease ends on its stated date. The termination section reaches only week-to-week and month-to-month tenancies, so no statute requires either side to give notice that a fixed term will not be renewed, and the word renew does not appear anywhere in the eviction chapter. Holding over past the stated term is actionable directly: the eviction chapter allows proceedings against tenants holding over their terms. Ohio has no statute requiring a landlord to remind a tenant before an automatic-renewal clause takes effect, and the state's consumer sales practices rules do not reach residential leases, so there is no alternative home for such a duty. The parties remain free to write their own notice term into the lease, because the chapter imposes none for a fixed term that such a term could override.

Ohio attaches no statutory label to a holdover: the phrase tenant at sufferance appears in neither the landlord-tenant chapter nor the eviction chapter, and no statute turns the holdover into a new tenancy. What the eviction chapter supplies is the ground, allowing proceedings against tenants holding over their terms, and the three-day notice to leave that must precede the filing. The landlord cannot resort to self-help: a possession action is the only way an Ohio landlord may require a tenant to leave.

Damages: No statutory enhancement: the landlord recovers ordinary rent or use and occupancy.

Ohio has no statutory holdover measure at all: no double rent, no treble damages, no percentage cap a lease may set, and no penalty. The words holdover, double and treble return nothing across the landlord-tenant chapter, and Ohio's damages title carries no tenant-holdover section of the kind some neighboring states keep outside their landlord-tenant chapters. A tenant who stays on is liable for what the landlord proves under ordinary contract principles, reduced by the landlord's duty to try to re-rent.

Yes: an appellate decision imposes the duty; no statute does.

When it attaches: The duty is the ordinary contract duty, so it attaches on any breach by the tenant and is not conditioned on the tenant abandoning the unit. The case that states it arose from a landlord-initiated termination for noise, not from an abandonment, and Ohio has no statutory abandonment definition that could gate it.

Burden of proof: no authority allocates it.

The standard: The landlord mitigates by attempting to re-rent the property, those efforts must be reasonable, and reasonableness is determined at the trial level. The Supreme Court set no fixed formula and no commercially reasonable gloss. A tenant is liable for the rent up to the point the landlord finds a new tenant, or the lease expires, whichever comes first. The court did remark on the facts before it that a seven-month vacancy strains the limits of reasonableness, which is a data point rather than a rule.

No authority addresses a clause accelerating the remaining rent.

Whether a lease may waive the duty is not settled.

Ohio has no mitigation statute; the word does not appear in the landlord-tenant chapter. The duty comes from the Supreme Court of Ohio, which held in a residential case that landlords have a duty, as all parties to contracts do, to mitigate the damages a breach causes, and that they mitigate by attempting to re-rent. The same decision settled a related point that trips landlords up: serving the three-day notice to leave that precedes an eviction filing does not end the tenant's obligation to pay rent for the rest of the term or until a new tenant is found with reasonable diligence. No Ohio authority allocates the burden of proving that the landlord's efforts were or were not reasonable; the nearest statement is that a landlord suing for damages must prove them, which is about damages generally. Nothing in the chapter addresses a clause accelerating the remaining rent, and the list of lease terms the chapter prohibits does not reach one. The commercial authority most often cited as Ohio's rule is a different case, and it conditions the duty on the tenant abandoning the leasehold; the residential rule does not.

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

No Ohio statute authorizes, caps or bars a fee for ending a residential lease early. The words early termination, liquidated and reletting return nothing across the landlord-tenant chapter. The chapter instead lets the parties include any terms and conditions, including terms about rent and the length of the agreement, that are not inconsistent with or prohibited by the chapter or another rule of law, so a lease may set such a fee. Three limits bite on it. The chapter's list of prohibited terms bars any agreement to pay the landlord's or the tenant's attorney's fees in a residential rental agreement, which caps what a landlord can add to a broken-lease claim. A court that finds the agreement or any clause of it unconscionable when it was made may refuse to enforce it, enforce the rest without the clause, or limit the clause to avoid an unconscionable result. And the landlord's duty to try to re-rent limits the future rent recoverable in practice. Ohio's administrative rules were read for this answer and none of them reaches a residential-lease fee: the only housing-adjacent agencies administer the housing trust fund and housing finance, and the Attorney General's consumer sales practices rules do not mention landlords, tenants or rental agreements at all.

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; death of the tenant, no statute.

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

No Ohio statute lets a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking or human trafficking end a residential lease early, and none gives victim status as a defense to a claim for rent. The landlord-tenant chapter mentions domestic violence twice and both times to take shelters for victims out of the chapter altogether. There is no lock-change right, no duty to keep a victim's documents confidential, and no protection against a later landlord holding the termination against an applicant. What Ohio does have is a court remedy that works on the abuser rather than on the lease: a civil protection order may grant possession of the residence to the person who applied for it, to the exclusion of the respondent, by evicting the respondent where the residence is owned or leased by the applicant alone, or by ordering the respondent to leave where it is jointly owned or leased. That order removes the abuser from the home; it does not release the victim from the rent or shorten the ordinary notice a tenant must give to leave.

Military service: State orders or National Guard duty are covered.

When the state rights attach: The extension attaches to members of the Ohio National Guard ordered by the governor to training or duty, and to no one else. The statute sets no minimum number of days, unlike several neighboring states, and gives a spouse or dependent no right of their own. The mechanics of ending a lease are the federal ones, not separate Ohio rules. The statute names the federal act by its pre-2015 place in the United States Code, which is where the act sat when the reference was written; the act itself is unchanged in substance.

Ohio does not write its own lease-termination mechanics for servicemembers. Instead, members of the Ohio National Guard ordered by the governor to perform training or duty have the protections the federal Servicemembers Civil Relief Act gives to people on federal active duty, which includes that act's lease-termination right. A member covered this way follows the federal notice and effective-date rules. Two Ohio provisions sit alongside it. The landlord-tenant chapter makes complying with tenants' rights under the federal act a landlord obligation as a matter of state law, so a failure can be pursued through the chapter's own tenant remedies rather than only in federal terms. And in a possession case against a tenant deployed on active duty, or against a member of that tenant's immediate family, where the ability to pay is materially affected, the court must on the tenant's motion either stay the case for 90 days, unless justice and equity require a different period, or adjust the obligation under the rental agreement; that stay reaches leases entered into on or after May 18, 2005 and does not apply to landlords operating fewer than four residential premises.

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

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

Ohio has no abandonment statute of any kind. The word abandon appears nowhere in the landlord-tenant chapter and nowhere in the eviction chapter. There is no presumption that a tenancy ends after a stated absence, no notice of belief of abandonment for a landlord to serve, no window for the tenant to answer one, and no statute about disposing of property a tenant leaves behind. A landlord who believes a unit has been abandoned must still end the tenancy the ordinary way, by giving the statutory notice or relying on one the tenant gave, and must file a possession action if the tenant does not go, because the chapter forbids any act to recover possession other than through the court procedures it names. One consequence is worth stating plainly: because Ohio's duty to re-rent comes from contract law rather than from an abandonment statute, it attaches on any breach and does not wait for a tenant to be declared absent.

The termination section prescribes no method at all. It says only that notice is given to the other party, and it does not even require a writing. The chapter contains no mention of certified mail and none of electronic delivery. This is Ohio's most misreported rule, and the mistake has a single source: readers import the eviction chapter's notice rules, which are a different document with different requirements. The three-day notice to leave that must precede an eviction filing is served by certified mail with return receipt requested, by handing a written copy to the defendant, or by leaving it at the defendant's usual home or at the premises, and it must carry a conspicuous statutory warning. Those rules do not travel back into the termination section. A landlord who serves a perfectly compliant three-day notice has not thereby given the 30 days the termination section requires.

Electronic delivery: the termination statute is silent on it.

What the notice must contain: The termination section states no content rule for a week-to-week or month-to-month notice: no form, no statement of grounds, no advisory language and no language requirement. The one content rule inside the section is for the three-day notice ending a tenancy for controlled-substance activity, which must say that the tenancy or other rental agreement ends three days after the notice is given. The conspicuous warning that a tenant is being asked to leave, and the advice to seek legal help, belong to the eviction chapter's pre-suit notice, not to a termination notice; service of the drug-activity notice satisfies that eviction notice, but the reverse is not true.

Ohio is unusual in writing a federal statute into its own landlord duties. The landlord-tenant chapter requires a landlord to comply with tenants' rights under the federal Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, which routes a failure into the chapter's own tenant remedies, including the rent-deposit and damages sections. A separate military statute extends the same federal act to Ohio National Guard members ordered by the governor to training or duty. Both provisions name the act by its pre-2015 place in the United States Code. Nothing in the landlord-tenant chapter refers to the CARES Act, to the Violence Against Women Act, or to the Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act.

The federal CARES Act 30-day notice to vacate for covered properties, as read in this state's courts: held by a state appellate court to require the notice before any eviction filing, with no limit to nonpayment cases. Olentangy Commons Owner, L.L.C. v. Fawley, 2023-Ohio-4039, 228 N.E.3d 621 (10th Dist. 2023), holds that the federal 30-day notice for covered dwellings has not expired, that a landlord must give it 30 days before filing the eviction action, and that a landlord who did not give it cannot invoke the municipal court's jurisdiction over that case, so the action is dismissed. The court stated the rule for eviction filings generally and rejected the argument that the notice is tied to the 2020 moratorium on nonpayment filings, so nothing in the decision confines it to unpaid-rent cases, although the case itself arose from unpaid rent. The Sixth District followed the jurisdictional point in Hampton Court, L.L.C. v. French, 2025-Ohio-1522. Two qualifications go with the answer. Olentangy reached the merits of an appeal it had already held moot, under the exception for cases of great general or public interest, so a later Ohio court could treat the discussion as non-binding. And in Woodbury Garden Homes v. Davis, 2024-Ohio-3414, the same district recorded a landlord's argument that the requirement ceased when the COVID-19 public health emergency ended in May 2023 and assumed rather than decided that it continues to apply, so that theory is live and unresolved in Ohio. The Supreme Court of Ohio has not ruled on any of it. (Appellate picture read as of September 4, 2026.)

Dennis v. Morgan, 89 Ohio St.3d 417, 2000-Ohio-211, 732 N.E.2d 391 (Supreme Court of Ohio; residential lease; bears on the duty to re-let): Issuing the three-day notice to leave that precedes an eviction filing does not end the tenant's obligation to pay rent for the rest of the term, or until a new tenant is found in the exercise of reasonable diligence. Landlords have a duty, as all parties to contracts do, to mitigate the damages a breach causes, and they mitigate by attempting to re-rent; those efforts must be reasonable and reasonableness is determined at the trial level. Where the landlord has acted reasonably, the tenant is liable for rent up to the point a new tenant is found or the lease expires, whichever comes first. The case arose from a one-year apartment lease and is Ohio's residential authority on the duty.

Frenchtown Square Partnership v. Lemstone, Inc., 99 Ohio St.3d 254, 2003-Ohio-3648, 791 N.E.2d 417 (Supreme Court of Ohio; arose from a commercial lease; bears on the duty to re-let): A lessor has a duty to mitigate the damages a lessee's breach of a commercial lease causes if the lessee abandons the leasehold; the lessor's efforts must be reasonable and reasonableness is for the trial court. The decision is confined by its own headnote to commercial leases and conditions the duty on abandonment, so it is not the rule for a home even though it is often cited as though it were.

Olentangy Commons Owner, L.L.C. v. Fawley, 2023-Ohio-4039, 228 N.E.3d 621 (10th Dist.) (Ohio Court of Appeals, Tenth District; residential lease; bears on the federal 30-day notice): The federal 30-day notice for covered dwellings has no expiration date and the court would not insert one Congress omitted; the notice must be given 30 days before a forcible entry and detainer action is filed, because in Ohio a court action is the only way a landlord may require a tenant to leave; and a landlord who did not give it cannot invoke the municipal court's jurisdiction over that particular action, which must be dismissed. The court reached these questions after holding the appeal moot, under the exception for cases of great general or public interest.

Woodbury Garden Homes v. Davis, 2024-Ohio-3414 (10th Dist.) (Ohio Court of Appeals, Tenth District; residential lease; bears on the federal 30-day notice): The landlord argued that the federal 30-day notice ceased to have effect when the COVID-19 public health emergency ended in May 2023. The court assumed for the purposes of the appeal that the requirement continues to apply and decided the case on whether the property was shown to be a covered dwelling, so the end-of-emergency argument remains open in Ohio.

Hampton Court, L.L.C. v. French, 2025-Ohio-1522 (6th Dist.) (Ohio Court of Appeals, Sixth District; residential lease; bears on the federal 30-day notice): A second Ohio appellate district followed the Tenth District's rule that a landlord of a covered dwelling who did not give the federal 30-day notice cannot invoke the trial court's jurisdiction over the eviction, so the action must be dismissed.