Sublease - Tenant - Becoming - Laws for Tenants in Alberta

Sub-Lease

If you are considering renting a place to live it is important to know if you are being offered a lease or a sub-lease.

For example, a sub-lease situation could arise in a fixed term tenancy where the original tenancy agreement is supposed to last for a period such as 6 months, a year, or longer. If the tenant can no longer live in the premises for the whole period, a sub-lease can provide a way in which the property can be rented to someone else for part of the full term. It is important because you will need to be clear about who your landlord is, and where you can find out what your rights and obligations are.

The Residential Tenancies Act requires a tenant to get the written permission of a landlord to sublet. If you do make a request to sublet, a landlord can only refuse on reasonable grounds and cannot charge a fee or ask for anything for giving consent. If a landlord does not answer the request to sublet within 14 days, he is taken to have agreed to the request.

In order to be a sub-lease, the agreement between you and the new tenant must be different from the agreement between the landlord and the original tenant. If it is exactly the same agreement, it will be an assignment, not a sub-lease. For this reason, a sub-lease will often state the same rights and obligations as the first agreement, but the length of the lease will be one day less than the original lease.

Benefits given to a tenant by the Act cannot be excluded by the tenancy agreement. This would seem to suggest that if a tenancy agreement stated that a tenant was not allowed to sublet, that term of the agreement would be void.

A sublease can occur in two ways:

Original tenant and new tenant live together

Original tenant moves out and new tenant moves in

May 2005