Repairs, and Keeping a Rental Fit to Live In

An Arizona landlord has to keep the property fit to live in. The duty starts the day the tenancy does and runs to the day it ends, and the Act sets it out as six specific things rather than as a general principle: comply with the building codes that materially affect health and safety, make the repairs that put and keep the place habitable, keep the common areas clean and safe, keep the electrical, plumbing, sanitary, heating, ventilating and air-conditioning equipment in good and safe working order, provide containers for waste and arrange removal, and supply running water and reasonable amounts of hot water at all times. Reasonable heat and cooling are owed too, but only where those units are installed and offered, and the section carries its own exceptions — the sixth duty is the one to read in full rather than in summary.

Parts of that can be moved onto the tenant, in writing and on strict conditions, and this page sets out which. What cannot be done is waiving it. Two of the duties are a floor that no agreement reaches, whoever signs.

Most of what this site covers happens once. The agreement gets signed, the disclosures get handed over, the deposit gets taken. Repairs are different, and that is why they are worth reading as a list.

This page is written for the landlord. If you are the tenant, the guide for tenants covers the same ground from your side.

What the Landlord Has to Do

Arizona sets out six duties, and they are worth reading as a list rather than as a general principle.

• Comply with the building codes that materially affect health and safety.
• Make all repairs and do whatever is necessary to put and keep the place in a fit and habitable condition.
• Keep the common areas clean and safe.
• Keep in good and safe working order every electrical, plumbing, sanitary, heating, ventilating and air-conditioning facility, along with the other appliances you supply — elevators included.
• Provide containers for ashes, garbage, rubbish and other waste, and arrange for removal.
• Supply running water and reasonable amounts of hot water at all times, and reasonable heat and reasonable air-conditioning or cooling where those units are installed and offered, when the season calls for it.

The heat-and-cooling duty applies where such units are installed and offered, which is the Act recognizing that not every rental has them. And it does not apply where the building is not required by law to be equipped for it, or where the unit is built so the tenant controls the supply through a direct public utility connection of their own.

The first duty also settles conflicts. Where an applicable building-code requirement imposes a greater duty than any other paragraph in the section, the statute says the landlord’s obligation is measured by that requirement.

What Materially Affecting Health and Safety Means

Most of the time a page like this would have to say that Arizona leaves the phrase undefined. It does not. The building-code duty points at a separate section that lists the conditions that count, and it is the most concrete thing in Arizona law on this subject.

The list is long. Grouped, it covers:

• Sanitation, ventilation and space. Missing or inadequate toilets, sinks, baths or showers. No hot and cold running water to the fixtures. Inadequate heating and cooling. Broken or missing windows and doors that create a hazard or invite trespassers. Too little natural light or ventilation. Rooms below the size the code requires. Inadequate electricity and lighting. No connection to a sewage system. Nowhere adequate to store or remove garbage. Infestation of insects, vermin or rodents.
• Structural hazards. Foundations significantly deteriorated, inadequate, or without adequate drainage. Floors or floor supports too small to carry their load safely. Walls or supports that split, lean or buckle. Sagging ceilings or roofs. Chimneys that list, bulge or settle.
• Hazardous wiring, plumbing and mechanical equipment that does not meet the code or has not been kept in good condition.
• Weather protection and exterior condition — roofs and walls that admit weather, missing paint or other protective covering, rotted or buckled coverings.
• Fire hazards and fire protection, including inadequate fire detection where the law requires it.
• Unsanitary or hazardous premises — accumulations of refuse, dead organic matter, stagnant water, rat harborages, combustible material.
• Inadequate exits, and improper occupancy, which covers rooms slept in that were never designed or permitted for it, and units occupied above the maximum the code allows.

A landlord getting a property ready has a real checklist there, and a tenant trying to work out whether a complaint is serious has a real answer.

The Tenant Has a List Too

The Act pairs the landlord’s duties with eight of the tenant’s, and several of them are the other half of the same obligation.

Comply with the building-code obligations that fall on tenants. Keep the occupied part as clean and safe as the condition of the place permits. Dispose of ashes, rubbish and garbage cleanly. Keep the plumbing fixtures as clean as their condition permits. Use the electrical, plumbing, heating, cooling and other systems reasonably. Do not deliberately or negligently damage or deface the property, or knowingly allow anybody else to. Behave, and require guests to behave, so as not to disturb the neighbors’ peaceful enjoyment.

And the eighth, which is the one the rest of this page turns on.

Why Written Notice of a Repair Matters

The tenant has to promptly notify the landlord in writing of any situation that requires maintenance, repairs, or any other action the landlord owes under the fit-premises section.

The landlord’s obligation exists whether or not anybody says anything. What notice does is open the tenant’s statutory remedies, each of which has its own notice requirement and its own waiting period. A tenant who mentions a leak in passing and a tenant who writes it down are in different positions three months later, when the ceiling comes down.

It works in the landlord’s favor as well, and in two ways. A written maintenance request is also the tenant’s permission to enter for that repair, and it waives the separate two days’ notice that entry would otherwise take — see landlord entry. And a request in writing, answered in writing, is the record of what was reported and when it was dealt with.

So give your tenant somewhere to write to. An email address, a portal, a form — anything reliable, named in the lease or handed over at move-in. Then keep the requests and what you sent back. A tenant who has no obvious way to report something in writing will telephone instead, and neither of you is helped by that.

What Arizona Does Not Say

A page that covered these over would read more comfortably and be less use.

There is no general deadline for making a repair. The section says make all repairs and do whatever is necessary. It does not say within a week, or promptly, or at all. The deadlines that exist belong to the tenant’s remedies below. They say how long a landlord has before a route opens for the tenant, which is a different thing from a deadline to make the repair.

Fit and habitable is not defined either, beyond the code conditions above. A condition can fall short of habitability without appearing on that list, and where it does, whether it counts would be for a court to decide.

If the Repair Is Not Made

Arizona gives a tenant several routes, and which one is available depends on what is broken and how much it costs to fix. The table is the quickest way through it.

Every one of these carries conditions the table cannot hold. Treat it as a map of which section may matter, not as instructions for using one.

Three of those conditions matter enough to state outright.

The repair-and-deduct route is narrow. It is capped, it needs a licensed contractor, and the tenant has to give the landlord an itemized statement and a waiver of lien before deducting. It is not available where the tenant, their family or their guest caused the condition, or where the condition is not a breach of fit and habitable in the first place. The ceiling is the reasonable cost of compliance coming to less than three hundred dollars, or to half a month’s rent where that is the larger of the two — a figure written into the section, so check it there if a legislature has since moved it.

The essential-services route is an election. A tenant who proceeds under it cannot also use the termination route or the repair-and-deduct route for that same breach, apart from damages that arose earlier. It carries no right to repair at all. And where the failure was deliberate, the substitute-housing remedy is enlarged.

Terminating is not the same as forcing a repair. The ten-day and five-day notices end the tenancy if the breach is not cured. They do not order anybody to fix anything. A tenant who wants the repair rather than the exit is looking at damages and injunctive relief, which the Act provides separately.

Never Shut Off a Service to Force the Issue

This one is aimed squarely at the landlord, and it is the fastest way to turn a repair argument into a much more expensive problem.

Where utilities are part of what the lease provides, Arizona forbids terminating them, except as necessary to make needed repairs or where the eviction section allows it. Nor may a landlord shift responsibility for paying them onto the tenant after the agreement has been signed, without the tenant’s written consent. A landlord who breaks that rule owes the tenant damages, costs and reasonable attorney fees, and can be enjoined — on top of the separate remedies for shutting a tenant out of the property altogether.

There is a related trap. Say the service goes off because the landlord has not paid the bill, and no separate meter exists for the tenants to transfer into their own names. They may then arrange with the utility to pay it themselves and deduct what they paid from the rent. They may keep doing that until the landlord gives adequate assurance the service will be maintained.

Cooling Is Not an Amenity Here

Everything above applies in every state that has a version of this Act. This part is Arizona.

A failed air conditioner in Phoenix in July is not a comfort complaint, which is why the Act names cooling alongside water and heat as an essential service in the first place. The remedies are the same ones, and the substitute-housing remedy in particular exists for exactly this: a tenant may move out for the period, stop paying rent for it, and recover something toward the excess cost.

The practical advice does not depend on parsing any of it. Treat a cooling failure in summer as an emergency and respond at emergency speed, whatever the statute’s minimum periods allow. The section’s notice periods are a floor for the tenant rather than a permitted delay for the landlord. And the households most at risk — older tenants, small children, anybody with a heart or respiratory condition — are the least able to wait out a ten-day clock.

Withholding Rent Is Not on the List

This is an important distinction, and it is missed in good faith by tenants who assume a landlord who is not performing has forfeited the rent.

The Act says otherwise, in terms: rent may not be withheld for any reason the chapter does not authorize. The deductions described above are authorized, and they are narrow. Keeping the rent because a repair has not happened is not among them, and it turns a repair complaint into a nonpayment case.

There is a proper route, and it runs through a courtroom rather than a bank account. If the landlord sues, the tenant may raise the landlord’s own noncompliance as a counterclaim, and the court can hold the rent while it decides who owes what. Rent, fees and charges works that through from the landlord’s side. Raising the landlord’s noncompliance in a court proceeding is a different thing from deciding not to pay. A counterclaim is a defense; withholding is a default.

When It Is the Tenant Who Is Not Complying

The tenant’s list is enforceable, and it runs on the same machinery pointed the other way. A material noncompliance with the agreement takes a written notice specifying the acts and omissions, and ends the tenancy in ten days if it is not put right. Where health and safety are materially affected it runs on five instead. Those are set out on ending a tenancy.

There is also a repair route in the landlord’s direction, and it is the mirror of the tenant’s. Where a tenant’s noncompliance materially affects health and safety and can be fixed by repair, replacing a damaged item or cleaning, you may serve written notice specifying the breach and asking for it to be remedied. If the tenant does not comply within fourteen days — or as promptly as conditions require in an emergency — you may enter, have the work done in a workmanlike manner, and bill the actual and reasonable cost as rent on the next rent day. If the tenancy has already ended, it is payable immediately.

Note how narrow that is. It reaches noncompliance materially affecting health and safety, not any breach of the tenant’s list, and only where repair, replacement or cleaning would fix it. It is not a route for recovering ordinary damage at the end of a tenancy, which is what the deposit procedure is for.

What Can Be Moved to the Tenant, and What Cannot

Some of these duties can be shifted by agreement, on conditions stricter than most people expect.

For a single family residence, the two of you may agree in writing, supported by adequate consideration, that the tenant handles the waste and utility duties and specified repairs, maintenance, alterations or remodeling. The statute requires that consideration and does not say what satisfies it, so assigning the task in the lease and leaving it there may not be enough.

For anything else, the agreement has to be a separate signed writing, again supported by consideration, and it must not diminish the landlord’s obligations to the other tenants in the building.

In both cases the arrangement has to be made in good faith rather than as a way around the obligation, and it can never cover work needed to meet the building-code duty or the fit-and-habitable duty. Those two are the floor.

Underneath all of it are two harder limits. The Act refuses to enforce any provision by which a tenant signs away rights or remedies it gives them, so a lease cannot reach the floor from that direction either — see what a lease cannot say. And the essential-services section says outright that a lease may not contain terms contrary to it.

What This Looks Like as Practice

Most of the above is about what a tenant may do. Read from the other side, it comes down to a short list.

• Give your tenant a reliable way to report a problem in writing, and say what it is.
• Record when a complaint arrived, not just what it said. Every clock on this page starts from receipt.
• Answer in writing, even when the answer is that somebody is coming Thursday.
• Keep the invoices and the contractor records. They are the evidence that the duty was met.
• Note your access attempts. A repair that could not be done because nobody was home is a different story from one that was ignored, and only the record tells them apart.
• Do not treat a tenant’s procedural mistake as the end of it. A tenant who used the wrong remedy, or none, has not released you from the underlying obligation.

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. 33-1324 is the fit-premises section, and most of this page sits inside it. The six duties are in subsection A. B settles which duty governs where the code obligation is the heavier one. C and D are the conditions attached to shifting any of them onto the tenant.
• A.R.S. 9-1303 lives in a different title altogether and lists the conditions counted as materially affecting health and safety. It is usable here only because the fit-premises duty names it.
• A.R.S. 33-1341 sets out what a tenant owes in return. Paragraph 8 carries the written notice, and it is the one to read before any of the others.
• A.R.S. 33-1361 is noncompliance by the landlord. Subsection A carries the ten days, and the five days where health and safety are materially affected. B is damages and injunctive relief, which exist alongside termination rather than instead of it. D returns the security if the agreement ends.
• A.R.S. 33-1363 is self-help for minor defects. Subsection A carries the cap, the ten days, the licensed contractor, the itemized statement and the waiver of lien. B is the two situations where it is not available.
• A.R.S. 33-1364 is the failure to supply heat, cooling, water, hot water or essential services. Subsection A is the three remedies. C stops a landlord cutting those services off, or transferring the bill to the tenant later without written consent. E forbids a lease term contrary to the section. G is the election. H says the rights do not arise until notice and do not include repair.
• A.R.S. 33-1369 is the landlord’s side of the repair remedy: the fourteen days, the written notice, and the itemized bill charged as rent. It reaches only tenant noncompliance materially affecting health and safety that repair, replacement or cleaning would fix.
• A.R.S. 33-1365 is the counterclaim, and the rent paid into court.
• A.R.S. 33-1366 is fire or casualty damage.
• A.R.S. 33-1368, subsection B, is the sentence about not withholding rent.
• A.R.S. 33-1315 is prohibited provisions, and the first item in subsection A is why the floor above cannot be written out of a lease.
• A.R.S. 33-1343 governs entry, and its subsection B is where a maintenance request doubles as consent to come in.