Do Tenants Have to Repaint When Moving Out Of a Rental Property?
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Is there an obligation to re-paint the property at the end of a rental contract?
Italian Corte di Cassazione recently confirmed, with sentence 29329/2019, the total absence of a rule that force the tenant to do the painting immediately before the return of the property.
In other words, receiving a painted property does not automatically means that it must be painted again at the end of the lease. Ultimately, no legal obligation requires the tenant to paint the property, with the consequence that the landlord won’t be able to impose it.
According to Art. 1590 cod. civ., the tenant, when returning the property, must leave it in a normal state of use and certainly not deteriorated or visibly damaged. And that’s it. In other words, the property must not be refurbished by the tenant and made it ready to be rented again the day after!
But what happens if the parties, in mutual agreement, insert in the contract a clause stating that the tenant will paint the property at the expiry of the contract? This clause, as established in the ruling of Corte di Cassazione, is simply void since they are ordinary maintenance costs that are always due, as the law imposes, to the Landlord. It therefore follows that the cost of painting can not be at the expense of the tenant.
So, to recap:
If a specific clause is missing in the contract, there will be no painting obligation for the tenant, therefore the landlord cannot claim anything;
If such a clause is included in a rental contract, the tenant should respect this clause and proceed with painting, but he/she’s not obliged to do it! We can therefore say that it’s useless to insert in a residential rental contract a clause on the painting obligation; if it is already written, the tenant can freely not respect it. In this sense, the tenant doesn’t have any legal obligation, but can accept this clause.
The only case in which tenants must necessarily give a new coat of paint to the property it’s when they make changes in the color of the walls, for example by painting in blue a wall that was originally white; the same goes in case tenants made clear damages to the walls. At the end of the contract, the property must look exactly as it was at the consignment.
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