Sublease

A sublease is an arrangement where your original tenant rents the unit, or part of it, to a third person while staying personally on the hook to you under the lease they already signed. The original tenant becomes a sublandlord to the new occupant, but your contract is still with the original tenant, so their name, their rent obligation, and their liability do not change.

That last point is what separates a sublease from an assignment. In an assignment the original tenant hands the whole lease to someone else and steps out; in a sublease they stay in the middle. You still chase the person who signed if the rent is short.

In practice

Say a tenant pays you $1,800 a month on a 12-month lease and takes a job in another city with five months left. Instead of breaking the lease, they find a subtenant and charge that person $1,650 a month. The original tenant pockets the difference or eats the $150 gap, and they keep paying you the full $1,800 every month. If the subtenant stops paying or damages a door, the original tenant still owes you the $1,800 and the repair, because the lease never left their name.

You almost always learn about this through a written request, because most leases require your prior written consent to sublet. A clean way to handle it is a short lease addendum that names the subtenant, states the sublease dates, and confirms the original tenant remains responsible for everything.

Why it matters to a small landlord

A sublease can save you a vacancy, but it also drops an occupant into your property whom you never screened. The fix is to keep your consent conditional: reserve the right to run the subtenant through your normal process before anyone moves in, and refuse a sublet only on consistent, documented grounds, never on protected-class lines. Whether you can refuse at all, and on what terms, depends on your lease language and your state's statute, so read both before you answer a request.

The other trap is the paper. A subtenant who pays the original tenant but whom you treat as your direct tenant can muddy who owes what later. Keep the original tenant as the party of record in your books, and if you let a subtenant pay you directly for convenience, write down that it does not release the original tenant. For the screening question itself, the same standards in any tenant vetting apply, and if the original tenant's reason is a long absence rather than a move, a switch in tenancy type may serve you better than a sublet.

A sublease sits next to a few terms worth knowing together. If two people sign one lease, joint and several liability means you can collect the whole rent from either of them, which is a different protection than a guarantor who backs a single tenant from outside the unit. When a request to sublet lands on your desk, the document that records your terms is a lease addendum, and that written record is what you will reach for if the arrangement goes wrong.