A renewal letter is the cheapest retention tool you have. Say the unit rents for $1,800 and the tenant walks: one vacant month is $1,800 gone, and paint, cleaning, and re-listing add another $1,500 or so before a new tenant pays anything, roughly $3,300 against a letter and a stamp. The full math on what a move-out costs is in the turnover guide; the short version is that a renewal sent on time is worth thousands.
Below are three letters you can copy today: a renewal at the current rent, a renewal with an increase, and an offer to convert to month-to-month. Fill the brackets, attach the renewal agreement or addendum the letter refers to, and get it out 90 days before the lease ends. The timeline for choosing among them comes after the letters.
Notice rules for renewals, non-renewals, and rent increases vary by state and sometimes by city, and rent-controlled or rent-stabilized units often have required forms and caps of their own. Use these letters as structure, check your lease and your state's statute for the notice period, and ask a local attorney when the stakes are real. This is not legal advice.
Letter 1: renewal at the current rent
Use this version when the rent is already at market, or when the tenant is good enough that holding the rate is worth more than testing it. It is the fastest yes a landlord ever gets.
Letter 1: renewal, same rent
Letter 2: renewal with a rent increase
An increase lands better when the letter states the new number, the old number, and the difference in plain dollars, with the offer still reading like you want them to stay. On sizing it, the working rule from how much to raise rent is that a raise big enough to push out a good tenant earns less than it costs: a $75 bump is $900 a year, and one turnover at the numbers above eats more than three years of it.
One scope note. This letter is for renewal time. Raising rent in the middle of a lease term is a different problem, the lease itself decides whether you can, and that letter lives on its own page: the rent increase letter template.
Letter 2: renewal with increase
Letter 3: the month-to-month option
This version keeps a tenant you like while keeping the unit loose, useful when a sale, a renovation, or your own move is somewhere on the horizon. You are trading certainty for flexibility, and many landlords price that flexibility with a modest premium over the fixed-term rate. Whether the trade favors you at all is its own question; month-to-month vs fixed-term works through it.
Letter 3: convert to month-to-month
The 90/60/30 timeline
Renewal letters fail on timing more often than wording. Work backward from the lease end date:
- 90 days out: decide. Pull your rent roll (the free rent roll template works if yours lives in your head), check comps for the unit, and read the payment history. Pick the variant and the number. If the decision is made, send the letter now; nothing is lost by being early.
- 60 days out: the letter must be in the mail. That leaves the tenant room to decide and leaves you room to list the unit if they pass. If you are not renewing, this is also the deadline to send a non-renewal letter instead; required notice commonly runs 30 to 60 days and some places require more, so confirm yours well before this date.
- 30 days out: response deadline. A signed agreement gets filed with the lease. Silence means you treat the unit as turning: schedule the make-ready, book the listing photos, and stop waiting.
Mistakes that turn renewals into vacancies
- Sending it 30 days out. A tenant who gets a renewal offer with four weeks left has often been apartment hunting for a month already. Late offers convert worse, and any vacancy that follows is one you scheduled.
- Letting the lease lapse into a holdover. In most places a tenant who stays past the end date slides into a month-to-month tenancy on the old terms by default. That can be fine, but it should be a decision recorded in Letter 3, not an accident you discover in February.
- A raise with no context. A new number with no old number, no difference, and no reason reads as a shove. The same $75 framed against taxes, insurance, and the going rate for similar units reads as arithmetic.
- Negotiating without your own numbers. If the tenant counters, you want your floor already computed: what the unit rents for vacant, what a month of vacancy plus make-ready costs, and where the break-even sits. A counter $40 below your ask is usually cheaper than a turnover, and you should know that before the phone rings.
The hard part is the calendar
Across even three or four units, lease end dates scatter through the year and none of them announce themselves. The 90-day letter and the 25-day letter are the same document; the difference is whether anyone noticed the date. I manage my own units from two time zones away, and lease end dates were exactly the kind of thing my spreadsheet dropped. rents.ai tracks each lease with a countdown that flags the tenant once the term is inside 90 days, and the dashboard lists upcoming expirations so the renewal decision starts on schedule. It will not draft this letter or send anything to your tenant; choosing the rent and mailing the offer stay with you. The letter above is the easy part. The date is the discipline.