Ending a tenancy: notice periods, form and the most common mistakes

The end of a tenancy is the moment when every shortcut taken at signing comes back to bite. As long as the tenancy runs, a vague clause about notice bothers nobody. No confirmation of receipt? Nobody asks. A loosely worded deadline for returning the deposit looks like a detail. Then one side wants out of the contract and all of it comes back. Working with tenanto users showed me something that surprised me at first: the dispute is almost never about the fact that notice was given. It is about the date on which the contract actually stops running, and about whether the other side received the letter at all. Three things decide whether notice is effective - the legal basis, the form and the delivery. Before I go through them one by one, I have to separate two situations that follow completely different logic: an open-ended contract and a fixed-term one.

Fixed-term and open-ended: two different ways out

With an open-ended contract, notice is the normal way to end a tenancy, with the notice period observed. But the freedom of an owner letting residential premises is heavily trimmed here by the rules protecting tenants - the list of permitted grounds is closed. A fixed-term contract works the other way round. As a rule it expires on its own, once the agreed period runs out, and early notice only comes into play if the contract itself sets out the situations in which the parties may give it.

The most common mistake in the documents that land in tenanto looks perfectly innocent. A fixed-term contract ends up with a sentence saying that either party may terminate the contract with one month’s notice - and that is all. No list of specific cases. Such a clause gets challenged precisely because it specifies nothing. A separate category is occasional and institutional letting, which have their own formal requirements, and those cannot be made up for after the fact. There is no point pretending otherwise: classifying a particular contract and judging whether a given clause would hold up in a dispute is a question for a lawyer, not for a template downloaded off the internet.

The notice period: when does it actually start running

The date notice is served and the date the tenancy ends are two different things. Confusing them generates more misunderstandings than the whole rest of this procedure put together. Periods counted in months usually end with the end of a calendar month, which means a tenancy can stretch several weeks beyond what both sides expected. Similar timing logic applies to changing rent during a tenancy, where what counts is not the date the letter was written but the end of a full month. And a letter served mid-month raises a further question about rent for the partial period. The answer? It depends on what the contract says.

Before the notice goes out, mark five dates in your calendar:

• the day the letter is delivered to the other party,
• the last day the contract is in force,
• the date of the handover report,
• the date for settling and returning the deposit,
• the day of the final meter readings.

Tip: write the contract end date down together with the deposit settlement date and set a reminder ahead of time. The deadline then speaks up before it passes, not a week after it.

Form and delivery: where notices most often fall apart

The safe standard is written form with a handwritten signature. A message in a chat app can be useful as evidence of what the statement said and when it was sent, but it will not replace the form the parties themselves wrote into the contract. And one more thing that is easy to forget: the burden of proving delivery sits with the party giving notice. What counts is how you send it, not the fact that you wrote it.

The second weak point is the address. Contracts usually name an address for service and impose a duty to keep it up to date, except that during the tenancy nobody remembers to do it. A missing current address can drag a case out by several weeks, and I see it regularly. Conversations with owners bring up another scenario as well: notice handed over in person, without a signed confirmation of receipt. In a dispute, practically impossible to prove.

Tip: keep the scan of the signed letter and the proof of posting together with the contract, not in your mailbox. Keep both with the same contract, along with the rest of the rental paperwork.

Notice for arrears: why arrears alone are not enough

Where payments are late, the rules protecting tenants require the owner to take one more step before giving notice: send a written demand for payment with an extra deadline and a warning that the contract will be terminated. Skipping that stage is reason number one why a formally correct letter turns out to be ineffective. The arrears alone - even obvious ones that have been running for months - do not replace the procedure.

Then there is the paperwork. The demand has to rest on a consistent history: when the obligation to pay arose, what payments came in, in what amounts and against which period they were credited, what correspondence went to the tenant. Owners who track their tenancy in a spreadsheet usually cannot reconstruct that a few months later. They remember the balance. The dates, not any more. A record of payments and arrears kept up to date gives you a ready basis for such a demand. We have collected more practical guidance on day-to-day rental management separately. In a real dispute and a possible eviction, you run the case with a lawyer, no discussion there.

What to do between the notice and handing over the flat

Treat the period between serving the letter and handing over the keys as an ordered sequence:

1. confirming the tenancy end date in writing,
2. agreeing a specific date for taking the flat back,
3. meter readings together with photo documentation,
4. a handover report signed by both parties,
5. settling the utilities,
6. settling the deposit,
7. handing over the full set of keys.

The handover report is the only real point of reference when the parties disagree about the condition of the flat. The description of the damage has to be specific: not “walls need repainting”, but which room and what exactly is damaged. The line between ordinary wear and tear and actual damage is also better spelled out in words in the report than left to guesswork. Deductions from the deposit require documented grounds, and their scope and deadlines depend on the contract and the particular situation - we went into this in more detail when writing about handover reports and deposit settlement.

Tip: photos from the report kept with the contract, rather than in your phone gallery, are the only material you will still be able to find a few months later.

Five mistakes we see most often

The repetition here is striking. The same situations come back regardless of the city, the rent level and the owner’s experience:

• terminating a fixed-term contract without a ground written into it,
• no evidence whatsoever that the letter was delivered,
• miscalculating the last day of the tenancy,
• notice for arrears served without a prior demand for payment,
• handing over the flat without a report.

The sixth mistake is less obvious: a letter written in vague terms, with no specific reason and no contract end date. The recipient does not know by when to move out, and the sender has nothing to fall back on. All these stories have one thing in common - documents and dates scattered across emails, spreadsheets and paper folders. Orderly documentation is not a formality for its own sake, it is the cheapest dispute prevention there is.

Summary

The order that brings the whole procedure together is simple: legal basis, form, delivery, calendar, report. Each element protects a different stage and none of them replaces the others. What I have described comes from watching hundreds of tenancies end, it is not legal advice on a particular contract - with unusual clauses, occasional letting or a real dispute, go to a lawyer. Organisationally the matter is far easier: the contract, the payment history, the deadlines and the reports in one place close off most problems before they even appear. In tenanto, the free plan for one flat covers one unit and one user, with no time limit.

Is notice sent by email effective?

The form set out in the contract always takes priority. Written form was stipulated? An email alone will not replace it, though it can serve as evidence of what the statement said and when it was sent. Where the contract is silent, written form with a signature and confirmation of delivery remains safer - not because email is worthless, but because in a dispute it is the sender who has to show that the letter arrived and when. I recommend sending it by registered post with confirmation of receipt and, in parallel, a scan by email. Simple and calm. We have collected answers to other recurring questions in our frequently asked questions.