Scan your rental lease before it costs you.

Free residential lease review. Every clause checked against your state's housing laws.

Your landlord had help writing it. Now you have help reading it.

Drop your lease here

PDF, JPG or PNG — up to 20MB

Add your lease and pick your state to start.

Encrypted upload, deleted after analysis

No login required · First flag free

Clauses we catch

Landlord may enter premises at any time without notice. Likely unenforceable

Free, in about two minutes:

  • How many clauses in your apartment lease work against you
  • How severe each one is, and the 12-month cost
  • Your first flagged clause in full — statute included

Live in California, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Texas? We check against that state's housing laws — and your city's, where local rules apply.

Residential rentals only — apartments, houses & rooms

Built for renters

We read your lease from your side, flagging fees and terms that may not be legal.

Live in 5 states

California, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Texas. More as each law corpus is verified.

Cited to the source

Every citation traces back to actual statute text, pulled from official state government records.

A person checks the law

Software reads your lease and applies the law. A person reviews the law itself first.

Residential Lease AgreementPage 7 of 14

21. INCIDENTAL FEES. In addition to any other charges provided herein, Tenant shall pay an incidental fee of $200.00 for each occurrence in which rent is received more than five (5) days after the due date.

A real “incidental fee,” buried on page 7 of a real lease. The apartment tour never mentioned it.

What you don't read is already deciding what you'll pay.

A lease arrives and you have 24 hours. That window isn't bad luck — it's leverage, and it's how the expensive clauses get past you.

Most of them don't hold up. But that only helps if you catch them first.

We tell you how worried to actually be.

  1. Immediate dealbreaker

    Don't sign as-is.

    Your money or your rights are at real risk.

  2. Financial trap

    Sign with caution.

    Legally gray — the kind of clause used to bluff you.

  3. Sign safely

    You're protected.

    Zero enforceability. The law already has you covered.

What a flag looks like

Immediate dealbreaker · Entry rightsFix this high risk

What the lease says:

Landlord reserves the right to enter the unit at any time for inspection.

What this means:

State law requires 24-hour notice before a landlord can enter your apartment, except in emergencies.

The law that fights this for you:

M.G.L. c. 186, § 15B

Upload. Get your Risk Score. Decide with your eyes open.

  1. 1

    Upload your lease

    PDF, photo, or scan. Even a blurry photo from your phone works. We handle messy layouts, tables, and handwritten notes.

  2. 2

    We cross-check it against the law

    Every sentence is compared against current state and local rental statutes. We flag what's risky, what's concerning, and what's void.

  3. 3

    Get your free Risk Score

    How many concerning clauses you have, sorted by severity, with a dollar exposure range. In a minute or two.

Why not just paste it into ChatGPT?

You can — to translate the legalese. It's genuinely good at that. Just don't let it tell you what's legal. Same clause, both ways:

A clause from your lease

“Tenant agrees to pay the first $800 of any plumbing or appliance repair during the term of the tenancy.”

A general AI chatbot

Answers from memory

That kind of clause is generally unenforceable in most states, since landlords are usually responsible for repairs. Rules can vary depending on your location, and I'm not a lawyer — you may want to check your local laws to be sure.

A representative reply — fluent, but hedged and averaged across fifty states. It never names the law it's relying on.

No statute you can verify. And its training may predate your state's current law.

LeasePatrol

Checked against the statute

Financial trap

Massachusetts law makes keeping the unit in repair the landlord's job — this clause tries to shift up to $800 onto you. You can sign, but you don't have to cover repairs the law puts on them.

Verifiable · from an official source

State Sanitary Code · 105 CMR 410.000

What to send: “Happy to sign — but I won't be covering repair costs the state assigns to the landlord.”

What's inside the Action Kit

Everything you need to sign with confidence, negotiate without fear, and protect your deposit from day one.

Lawyers charge $300+$8.99

One-time scan — no subscription

  • Full triage dashboard & translations

    Every clause flagged, explained, and sorted by severity. Plain-English translation of the legalese, backed by the exact statute.

  • Dollars-at-risk calculator

    What a financial-trap clause could actually cost you over a 12-month lease — before you agree to it.

  • Pre-written negotiation emails

    Landlord-ready templates that push back on a concerning clause professionally, without blowing up the deal.

  • Move-in condition statement

    Document every pre-existing scratch, dent, and stain from day one, so your deposit comes back in full.

Less than the cost of one late fee — to catch every fee they were counting on you not to read.

The law is already on your side. Walk in knowing it.

See where you stand before you sign anything.

Drop your lease here

PDF, JPG or PNG — up to 20MB

Add your lease and pick your state to start.

Encrypted upload, deleted after analysis

No login required · First flag free

Wherever you are in renting, this comes up

  1. Before signing

    You have a day to decide on a 12-month contract

    Upload it first and see what is actually enforceable.

    Scan a lease
  2. Mid-tenancy

    The landlord stops answering about repairs

    We name the exact habitability code section, so your next message is more than a complaint.

    Read the fee guides
  3. Move-out

    Getting the full deposit back

    Document the unit on day one, so there is no argument later.

    Read the deposit guides

Frequently Asked Questions

Illegal clauses, tenant rights, and what we do with your lease.

LeasePatrol is built for renters. Plenty of landlords are fair and want a clean lease as much as you do, but our job is to read your agreement from your side: checking it against the law and flagging fees or terms that could cost you. So the analysis you get is always in your interest.

You upload a PDF or a photo of your lease. We pull out every clause, compare it against your state and city's landlord-tenant law, and flag anything that's unenforceable, financially risky, or worth negotiating. The free version gives you a risk score and a category breakdown. The paid Action Kit gives you the exact clauses, the statute behind each flag, and a negotiation email you can send as-is.

No — LeasePatrol reviews residential rental leases only: apartments, houses, condos, and rooms you rent to live in. We don't handle commercial, office, retail, car, or equipment leases.

No, and we say that at every step, including before you upload anything. LeasePatrol is a software tool that gives you information and a starting point for negotiating. If you're facing an eviction, a lawsuit, or anything with real legal stakes, talk to a tenant lawyer or your local legal aid office.

Both, at different stages. Software reads your lease and matches clauses to the relevant law, and yes, that includes an AI model. But the law text itself — the actual statutes we compare your lease against — comes from official state government sources and is reviewed before it goes live, not scraped and trusted blindly. The AI applies the law; it doesn't get to decide what the law says.

Unless you're a real estate attorney, it's genuinely hard to spot on your own. Landlords sometimes include terms that don't hold up — waiving your right to a habitable unit, non-refundable deposits where local law requires them refundable, fees that exceed what's legally allowed. LeasePatrol checks your lease against your specific state and city's rules and tells you exactly which lines are the problem.

A few that show up often: making tenants pay for all repairs including structural ones, waiving the landlord's liability for their own negligence, unrestricted entry without notice, and late fees that exceed what state law caps them at. Where these appear, they're typically unenforceable even though they're printed in the contract.

No — but plenty of landlords count on tenants not knowing that and paying or complying anyway. Signing a lease with an illegal clause in it doesn't make that clause enforceable. It just means you now know something your landlord was hoping you wouldn't.

We're live in California, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and Texas right now, including New York City's local housing code layered on top of state law. We add a new state once its law database has been built and checked, not before — so coverage grows, but we won't claim a state is covered until it actually is.

It depends entirely on your state and what's actually going on — a job relocation, a safety issue, an uninhabitable unit, or just wanting out are all treated differently under the law. Upload your lease and select your state, and we'll tell you what your state's early-termination rules say and what your lease claims separately, since those two things don't always match.

A lawyer might take days and charge a few hundred dollars for the same review. LeasePatrol gives you a full risk breakdown in a minute or two — long enough to matter during the 24 hours most renters get to decide before the apartment is gone.

One hidden fee or one penalty clause can cost you hundreds of dollars over a 12-month lease. A free scan costs you nothing and takes less time than reading the lease itself.

Usually not, if they conflict with your state's implied warranty of habitability — the baseline legal requirement that a rental be safe and livable regardless of what the lease says. We flag 'as-is' language specifically so you're not stuck covering a landlord's deferred maintenance.

Still reading? Your lease only takes two minutes.