The Ultimate Guide to Breaking Your Apartment Lease

In an ideal world, your lease schedule would sync up perfectly with your life plans. But the chances of perfectly aligning your apartment move-out date with other major events, like the closing date on a new house or a cross-country move to take a promotion, are pretty darn slim. 

So, here you are: You need to move out earlier than expected, and you’ve got some questions on how to break a lease (and you hope to do so without obliterating your budget). With tips from experts, consider this your ultimate, stress-free guide to breaking a lease.

The short answer is yes, you can get out of an apartment lease early. But breaking a lease might require you to pay the remaining months left on your lease. A way out of this is to find a suitable replacement tenant who can sublet your place, saving you from exorbitant fees (more on that later).

“The first place you should look about how to go about breaking your lease is the lease itself,” says Jeffrey Johnson, J.D., and a legal writer for FreeAdvice.com. “Almost every lease is going to have a section about terminating your lease, and these are going to vary from landlord to landlord.”

A common stipulation in leases, though, is that tenants can’t sublet without prior written approval from the landlord, Johnson says. That is to say, you can’t just go rogue and sub in a new tenant without getting permission from your landlord, who will likely want to run a background and credit check on your replacement.

In the section about early-termination procedures and penalties, Johnson says, you might also see a phrase about “liquidated damages,” which refers to a predetermined amount that covers expenses like advertising the vacant rental and performing maintenance before turning it over to a new renter.

Also, when it comes to tenant rights, you’ll want to be familiar with laws, which vary depending on where you live. Legal encyclopedia Nolo has a comprehensive guide on tenant rights broken down by state.

If you’re hoping for an easy exit while breaking your lease, knowing your rights as a renter is important. For instance, military service members are legally allowed to break their leases with notice and many states have laws protecting renters who need to relocate because of a job or a family emergency. 

There are plenty of legitimate reasons why you need to break your lease, whether it’s a job transfer, breaking up with your co-habitant, or closing on a new home. So, simply breaking a lease won’t affect your credit. But if you skipped out of your lease without paying outstanding rent or the penalties associated with breaking your lease, those costs will likely go to collections, and that would ding your credit, Johnson explains. 

Payment history—which includes whether you have any accounts in collections—makes up 35 percent of your FICO score, so you don’t want to leave unpaid rent or fees in your wake.

Yes, it’s possible to get all or part of your security deposit back, says Andrew Chen, an attorney and a landlord based in the San Francisco Bay area and the founder of Hack Your Wealth, a personal finance site. However, getting a full deposit refunded after you break a lease might be tricky: There can’t be damages beyond normal wear and tear to the unit and the landlord needs to be able to re-rent your apartment without a vacancy gap.

“This scenario is unlikely, though, given the timing, since it would be difficult to line up a new tenant moving in exactly one day after the prior tenant departs,” Chen says. 

If you stop paying rent after vacating the unit, he says, your security deposit will then likely be used to cure any delinquent rent payments.

Here are some more tips for getting your security deposit back after breaking your lease.

Your landlord must take reasonable steps to re-rent your unit, Chen says, and you are not technically responsible for helping find a new tenant. 

However, if the landlord agrees to your assistance, you can help find a new tenant, which may accelerate the process and help relieve you from some fees. 

Here are some tips for finding someone to take over your lease ASAP.

• Sites and apps like Flip and leasebreak can also help match lease breaks with short-term tenants. 
• Advertise your rental on Facebook Marketplace. 
• Host a group showing or open house if your landlord will allow you to do so. 
• Let your circle of friends and family know you’re looking for a subletter; they may know someone who needs a short-term rental. 
• In the case that you’re buying a house, let your real estate agent know you need to break your lease. Your agent may have a good pool of potential renters who can take over your lease.

It’s possible you could get out of a lease because your apartment is unlivable. Landlords have a duty to provide habitable accommodations in their rented units,  Chen says. 

This almost always means, at a minimum, structural soundness of the unit, including the floors, stairs, and roof, as well as  hot running water, working plumbing and electricity, heat, and an absence of rodents, vermin, and mold, Chen says. The need for new carpeting or the presence of mildew in the shower won’t warrant a faulty apartment, though.

If you want to break your lease and claim that you’re doing so because the apartment is faulty or inhabitable, you’ll need to have proof that you tried to remedy the situation by notifying your landlord of any problems and requesting the issues be fixed, Chen explains. You’ll need to be able to show the landlord had ample notice but refused or neglected to address the problems.

“If you are raising this issue for the first time when you break your lease, you will not likely be successful in using this as a defense, because the landlord would not have reasonably known about the issue prior to your notifying him or her about it,” he says.

Early termination clauses are provisions in rental lease agreements that spell out the conditions under which tenants can terminate their leases early, Chen says. It could be due to a job loss or transfer, for instance, and it may come with an early termination fee, like paying one or two months of rent. 

“Assuming you meet the conditions of an early termination clause, it will allow you to terminate your lease without further penalties beyond what is specified in that clause,” he says.