Lease Clauses Arizona Law Will Not Enforce

Most of Arizona’s landlord and tenant law describes what a landlord has to do. One short section works the other way round.

It names five provisions that cannot go into a residential rental agreement. If your lease contains one of them, that provision is unenforceable even though your tenant signed the agreement.

This page is written for the landlord putting an agreement together. If you are the tenant and you think your lease contains one of these, the same five apply to you and the guide for tenants covers what that means from your side.

What to Look For in a Form

If you are checking a lease you downloaded, these are the shapes to look for. The wording on the left is the kind that appears in general-purpose forms, not language from the statute.

Treat that as a way of spotting candidates, not as a ruling. Whether a particular clause is caught depends on how it is actually written, and answering that means a lawyer reading your actual document, not a table reading a form.

The Five, One by One

1. Giving Up Rights Under the Act

A lease cannot ask a tenant to waive or forego rights or remedies the Act gives them.

A clause saying the tenant takes the property as is, with no further obligation on the landlord, is trying to sign away protections a tenant cannot sign away. It usually appears without anybody meaning harm by it, which is why it survives in so many forms.

There is a real boundary here, though, and the page would mislead you without it. Arizona does allow a landlord and tenant to agree in writing that the tenant takes on some specific jobs that would otherwise be the landlord’s.

For a single family residence, that can cover arranging the removal of garbage and waste, supplying water, heat and cooling, and specified repairs, maintenance, alterations or remodeling. For anything other than a single family residence it is narrower: specified repairs, maintenance, alterations or remodeling only, and it has to sit in a separate signed writing.

Either way the conditions are strict. The agreement must be genuine, supported by adequate consideration, and not a device for evading your obligations. And the work cannot be work needed to meet building codes affecting health and safety, or to keep the property fit and habitable. Those duties stay yours whatever the lease says.

So the distinction to hold on to is between signing away the Act’s protections, which does not work, and agreeing in writing who does a specific job, which can. An unlimited “as is” clause is the first. A written term saying your tenant maintains the yard is the second.

2. Agreeing to Pay the Landlord’s Attorney Fees

A one-sided provision requiring your tenant to pay your attorney fees is prohibited. Arizona does allow a prevailing-party fee provision, where the fees follow whichever side wins, and it says something about fees in eviction cases regardless of what the lease provides. Both exceptions sit in the same sentence of the statute and both are explained below.

3. Excusing the Landlord From Liability

A lease cannot excuse or limit any liability of the landlord arising under law, and it cannot ask the tenant to indemnify the landlord for that liability or the costs that come with it.

Wording along the lines of “the landlord is not responsible for any injury, loss or damage however caused” sits squarely here. So does a hold-harmless clause, which is the same idea approached from the other direction: rather than excusing you, it asks your tenant to pay for it.

4. Limiting the Right to Call for Help

A lease cannot waive or limit the tenant’s right, or anybody else’s right, to summon a peace officer or other emergency assistance in response to an emergency.

Note the breadth of that. It is not only the tenant’s right. A clause that discourages a guest, a neighbor or a family member from calling is inside the prohibition too.

5. Penalizing a Tenant for Calling for Help

Related to the fourth, and separate from it. A lease cannot impose a monetary penalty on a tenant, or otherwise penalize them, because they or anybody else summoned a peace officer or emergency assistance in an emergency.

The fourth prohibition stops you forbidding the call. The fifth stops you charging for it afterward.

The statute’s words are “payment of monetary penalties or otherwise penalizes the tenant”, so the prohibition is not limited to money. A rule treating a number of police calls as a lease violation is the shape it exists to catch.

One practical note about where such clauses come from. They often arrive in a crime-free lease addendum rather than in the lease itself. That is a document a landlord may be asked to attach for reasons unconnected to Arizona’s statute. An addendum is part of the agreement, and these two prohibitions apply to it exactly as they apply to the lease.

What Happens if One Is in Your Lease

Two things follow, and they are not the same thing.

The clause is unenforceable. It does not need to be struck out or renegotiated to stop working, because it never worked. The rest of the agreement carries on as normal, so a prohibited clause does not void your lease.

There may also be damages, and they turn on knowledge. Where a landlord deliberately puts one of these into an agreement, knowing it is prohibited, the tenant may recover actual damages and not more than two months’ periodic rent.

Because that remedy depends on what the landlord knew, whether it applies to any particular situation is a question for a lawyer rather than a web page. The practical response is simpler than the legal test: read the form before you hand it to anybody.

What If a Lease You Have Already Signed Contains One?

This is the question most readers of this page arrive with, and the answer starts with something reassuring.

The provision is already unenforceable. Nothing has to be signed, struck out or renegotiated to make that true, and the rest of the agreement is unaffected. You are not in breach of anything by having it in there.

From there the sensible general steps are short.

• Do not rely on the provision or try to enforce it. It will not hold, and invoking it is the step most likely to turn a dead clause into a dispute.
• Correct the form before you use it for anybody else.
• For agreements already running, consider removing the provision by written agreement, or replacing the form at the next renewal or new tenancy.
• If the provision has already been invoked, or there is a dispute about it, a lawyer should look at it rather than a general page.

The Attorney-Fee Exception, Read Carefully

Legal costs are not a forbidden subject. The statute allows two things in the same breath as the prohibition.

First, a written agreement may provide that attorney fees are awarded to the prevailing party, whichever side that turns out to be. What it cannot do is point one way only, obliging your tenant to cover your costs regardless of who wins.

Second, in a contested forcible detainer action the prevailing party is eligible to be awarded attorney fees under a separate statute, whether or not the lease says anything about it. Eligible, not guaranteed: that statute says a court may award fees to the successful party, so it is a discretion rather than an entitlement.

The practical position follows. A one-sided clause is prohibited and adds a bad provision to your agreement. A prevailing-party clause is the version Arizona permits, and in an eviction the possibility of a fee award does not depend on your lease containing one at all.

Why Downloaded Forms Collect These

Do not assume a general-purpose lease form complies with Arizona law. A form written to be used in several states may contain provisions Arizona does not permit, and broad liability waivers and one-way fee clauses are exactly the provisions that travel.

Some downloaded forms are genuinely state-specific and some are not, so the check is worth doing either way. The consequence lands on the landlord who used the form, not on whoever published it.

If you are putting a lease together, what a lease should include covers the other half of the problem. The lease form page explains where to get a form drawn for Arizona rather than adapted to it.

What This Section Does Not Do

These rules do not stop a landlord using Arizona’s ordinary procedures to end a tenancy where grounds exist. The statute says so in its own final sentence, which points at the eviction section by name.

The notice each situation requires is set out on ending a tenancy.

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. 33-1315 is the whole of this page. Subsection A lists the five prohibited provisions and carries both attorney-fee exceptions inside item 2. Subsection B makes a prohibited provision unenforceable and sets the damages where a landlord deliberately used one knowing it was prohibited. Subsection C is the sentence confirming that none of this limits the right to evict.
• A.R.S. 33-1324 is the landlord’s duty to maintain the property, and it is where the boundary under item 1 comes from. Repairs and habitability works that boundary through in full. Subsections C and D set out when a tenant may agree in writing to take on specified jobs, and the conditions attached. They also fix the duties that can never be shifted: building codes affecting health and safety, and keeping the property fit and habitable.
• A.R.S. 12-341.01 is the general attorney-fee statute, outside the landlord and tenant Act. It is the one allowing a prevailing party to be awarded fees in a contested action, which is why a one-way clause in the lease adds nothing.
• A.R.S. 33-1368 is the eviction section that subsection C points to.