Leasing a Room in Your Own Home

Leasing a spare room feels different from leasing out a property, and people often assume it falls outside the landlord and tenant rules for that reason.

It should not be assumed. Arizona’s Act refers to a roomer who pays weekly rent, which is the closest the statute comes to describing this arrangement. But that word is doing more work than it looks, and the first job of this page is to say what it means.

This page is written for the owner of the home. If you are the person leasing the room, the guide for tenants covers the same rules from your side.

What Arizona Means by a Roomer

A roomer, in Arizona’s definition, is somebody occupying a home that lacks a major bathroom or kitchen facility of its own, in a structure where one or more of those facilities are shared between that home and other homes in the building. The Act is specific about which facilities count: a toilet, a bath or a shower for the bathroom; a refrigerator, stove or sink for the kitchen.

Read it slowly and you will notice what it describes. The sharing runs between separate units in a building — which is a rooming house or a boarding house, not obviously a spare bedroom in a family home where the lodger shares the kitchen with you.

Arizona does not say which side of that line a room in an owner-occupied house falls on, and this page is not going to guess. Anyone telling you a lodger in your spare room is definitely a roomer, or definitely is not, is going beyond what the statute says.

It matters because of what turns on the word, which is the next section.

Whether Paying Weekly Changes the Notice Period

Where the agreement fixes no definite term, Arizona supplies one. It is month to month in every case but one: a roomer, paying weekly, gets a week-to-week tenancy instead.

Both halves of that matter. Weekly payment on its own does not produce a week-to-week tenancy; it does so only where the person paying is a roomer. So a lodger with a bedroom and their own en-suite bathroom, handing over rent every Friday, may well hold a month-to-month tenancy, with the longer notice period that goes with it, and neither of you would guess.

The difference is not small. A week-to-week tenancy ends on ten days’ written notice; a month-to-month tenancy takes thirty. Which one you are in can therefore depend on a question about your bathroom that no one thinks to ask.

The way out of the uncertainty is the same one the Act offers everybody: fix a definite term in the agreement, and the default never comes into play. Ending a tenancy sets out how notice has to be given and counted.

Whether the Act Applies at All

There is a further question underneath all of this, and a shared house is where it bites.

Living in the house yourself does not put the arrangement outside the Act; Arizona wrote no exemption of that kind. The difficulty is in the definition of a tenant, which asks whether the person is entitled to occupy to the exclusion of others, alongside a definition of a home that turns partly on whether its occupants keep a common household. A lodger with a lockable bedroom, their own key and their own life is a comfortable fit for that. Somebody occupying a spare room in a household otherwise run as one is a good deal less comfortable, and Arizona defines neither phrase.

Two exclusions from the Act can also turn up in a shared house. One is occupancy by an employee of the landlord as a manager or custodian, where the right to occupy depends on the employment — a room given to somebody as part of what they do for you, rather than leased to them. The other is occupancy under a contract of sale, where the occupant is the buyer. The list opens with a condition on all of it: no exclusion is available to an arrangement set up in order to escape the Act.

None of those exclusions automatically covers an ordinary arrangement where somebody pays to occupy a room in your home. Where yours has an unusual feature — occupancy tied to a job, or to some relationship that is not a rental at all — that is worth checking before relying on anything below.

Notice Still Has to Be in Writing

This is the rule most often broken in a shared house, because the two of you see each other every day and handing over a letter feels absurd.

It is still the rule. Written notice, the right number of days, counted to the right date. A conversation in the hallway does not do it, and neither does a text message agreed to at the time, because what the Act asks for is a written notice with the termination date in it.

Your Own Home, and the Entry Rules

Sharing a front door does not give you unlimited access to the room you have leased out.

The entry rules were written with a landlord who lives elsewhere in mind, and they sit awkwardly over a shared house. The principle underneath them holds regardless: you must not abuse access or use it to harass, and outside an emergency, entry is on at least two days’ notice and at reasonable times.

What the Act does not do is tell you how that works when the bathroom is shared and the kitchen is common ground. It says nothing about which parts of your own house are the tenant’s exclusive space and which are not, and that silence is exactly where shared-house arguments start.

So the agreement should identify the room being leased and the areas shared with you. It can also arrange access more generously than the Act requires, if that is what suits the two of you.

What it cannot do is go the other way. A rental agreement may not have the tenant give up rights or remedies under the Act, and a clause attempting it is unenforceable. So “the owner may enter the room at any time” — written in perfect good faith at a kitchen table — does not buy you anything. Agree whatever you like above the floor the Act sets. Nothing below it counts, and repairs and habitability shows where that line runs on the maintenance duties. Landlord entry covers the rules the Act does supply, and what a lease cannot say covers the waiver point.

Decide How Utilities Are Handled

An obvious question in a shared house, and one worth settling in the agreement rather than in a monthly conversation.

If the rent is a single figure covering electricity, water and the rest, say so in the agreement and the matter is closed. Billing your lodger separately for a utility is a different proposition, and Arizona regulates it closely: only certain methods are permitted, the agreement has to disclose what is being billed and any fee attached, and there are requirements about the bill itself. Read charging tenants for utilities before going that way.

Choosing Who Lives in Your Home

Choosing a lodger for a room in the house you live in sits under different rules from choosing a tenant for a rental property, and this is the one place on this site where the difference actually favors the reader.

Both federal and Arizona fair housing law carry an exemption for rooms or units in a dwelling with living quarters for no more than four families living independently of each other. It applies where the owner maintains and occupies one of those quarters as their own residence. An owner leasing a spare room in the home they live in is the situation being described.

Advertising is carved out of the carve-out. Whatever the exemption does for your choice of lodger, it does nothing for the wording of the notice you put up. Race, color, religion, sex, disability, familial status and national origin are all off limits there, whether stated as a preference, a limitation or an intention to apply one. The listing is regulated even where the choosing may not be.

Fair housing is not a subject this site covers in depth. The exemptions are narrower and more technical than any paragraph can carry, and shared living has generated case law of its own. Take this one to a lawyer before the room goes on the market.

Deposits Work the Same Way

Where the arrangement is a residential tenancy the Act covers, and you take a deposit, the ordinary deposit rules apply even though what you have leased is one room.

Everything held as security counts toward one ceiling, whatever the individual pieces are called. Anything you intend to keep needs designating as nonrefundable, in writing, or it goes back at the end. And the closing accounting runs to the same deadline it would anywhere else. None of that changes because the room is in your own house, and a lodger who never signed anything is owed it just the same. Security deposits has the detail.

Write Down What a Shared House Actually Argues About

The statutory requirements are the easy part. What ends lodging arrangements badly is everything the Act says nothing about.

Guests staying over. Kitchen and bathroom use. Noise at night. Parking. Whether the room comes furnished. Who buys the milk. Smoking. Whether a partner can effectively move in without anybody deciding they have.

None of that is legally required to be written down, and all of it is worth writing down. A page of house rules attached to a short agreement heads off most of the disputes that end these arrangements badly. They are yours to set, within the limits already described — house rules cannot cut into what the Act gives your lodger, and they sit under fair housing law like everything else about the arrangement.

What the agreement itself has to carry is on what a lease must say, including the requirement that every blank space in it is filled in.

If Your Lodger Will Not Leave

This is the part a shared house makes hardest, because the person who has ignored your notice is not across town. They are behind a door in your hallway, and you will pass them in the kitchen every morning until it is resolved.

The route is the ordinary one, and ending a tenancy walks through it: written notice first, then a court action for possession if the notice expires with nothing changed. A notice on its own moves nobody out.

What you cannot do is handle it as a household matter. Changing the lock on their door, moving their belongings into the garage, turning off the power to the room. Shut a tenant out without a court order, or wilfully interrupt their electricity, gas, water or another essential service, and the Act gives them a choice: possession back, or an end to the agreement. Either way they also recover whichever is larger, two months’ periodic rent or twice what the episode actually cost them. The temptation is strongest here, in your own house, which is exactly why the rule is worth knowing before you need it.

Where These Rules Come From

Arizona’s laws are collected in a set called the Arizona Revised Statutes, usually shortened to A.R.S. The number that follows points to one section of it.

You do not need these numbers to use this page. They are here so that you, or a lawyer you hire, can check the exact wording. Each one links to the official text on the Arizona Legislature’s website, which opens in a new tab.

• A.R.S. 33-1310 supplies the vocabulary, and three entries settle most of this page. Paragraph 14 is the roomer, with the list of what counts as a major facility. Paragraph 17 is the tenant, and the exclusion-of-others wording sits there. Paragraph 4 is the dwelling unit, where common household appears.
• A.R.S. 33-1314, subsection D, is the sentence this page turns on. It reaches only an agreement with no definite term in it, and within that it separates the weekly-paying roomer from everybody else.
• A.R.S. 33-1308 is the exclusions list. Paragraph 5 is the employee-manager whose occupancy depends on employment, and paragraph 2 is occupancy under a contract of sale. Its opening words are the anti-avoidance condition, which withholds every exclusion from an arrangement built to escape the chapter.
• A.R.S. 33-1375 is periodic tenancies: subsection A is the ten days for week to week, subsection B the thirty days for month to month.
• A.R.S. 33-1343 is access. Subsection D carries both the no-abuse rule and the two days’ notice at reasonable times.
• A.R.S. 33-1315 is the prohibited provisions, and the entry floor comes from the first item in subsection A — no agreement may have a tenant surrender rights or remedies the chapter gives.
• A.R.S. 33-1367 is the unlawful ouster section, and it sets out what a tenant gets back where a landlord takes possession into their own hands or kills an essential service.
• A.R.S. 33-1321 is security deposits, which reach a room in your own home the same as anywhere else.
• A.R.S. 33-1314.01 governs charging a tenant separately for a utility, as opposed to folding the cost into a single rent figure.
• Fair housing. A.R.S. 41-1491.02, subsection A paragraph 2, is the Arizona owner-occupied exemption, and 42 U.S.C. 3603, subsection (b) paragraph 2, is the federal one. The advertising rules they do not reach are A.R.S. 41-1491.15 and 42 U.S.C. 3604, subsection (c).