Note: This article provides general education about maintenance responsibility, not legal advice. Habitability standards, repair timelines, and what a lease may and may not shift onto a tenant vary by state and municipality. Before denying a repair request or charging a tenant for damage, confirm your obligations under applicable law.
Most maintenance disputes are not really about the repair. They are about who was supposed to handle it, and the fact that nobody wrote it down.
A tenant reports a clogged drain and expects it fixed by Friday. The landlord looks at the same drain and sees a tenant who has been pouring grease down it for eight months. Both of them believe they are right, and neither of them can point to anything that settles it. That is the argument, and it is almost always avoidable.
Shuk was recently asked to weigh in on exactly this question for Redfin's guide to apartment maintenance. This article is the landlord-side version: where the line actually falls, what happens when a tenant does not report something, and how to set the expectation early enough that the argument never starts.
Featured on Redfin
We were featured as an expert on Redfin | Read the full article here: Apartment Maintenance: What It Covers (and What It Doesn’t)
The article was published on the Redfin Blog, which is the original source. Miles Lerner, CEO of Shuk Rentals, was quoted in it on where responsibility falls: "Plumbing, heating and cooling, electrical, and major appliances fall to the landlord along with repairing normal wear and tear." He was quoted again on the reporting problem behind most disputes: "A small leak left unreported can become the tenant's responsibility once it causes damage that could have been avoided."
That piece is written for renters. What follows is the landlord-side companion to it.
What the landlord is responsible for
The general rule across most of the country is that the landlord owns the building and everything the building needs in order to be habitable. Specifics vary by jurisdiction, but the categories are consistent.
Core systems are the landlord's, without much argument. Plumbing, heating and cooling, electrical, and water heating all fall here. So do major appliances when the landlord supplies them, which means a refrigerator or range that came with the unit is the landlord's to repair or replace, while the tenant's own window air conditioner is not.
Structure and weatherproofing are the landlord's: roof, walls, floors, foundation, and keeping water on the outside of the building. So are locks, exterior doors, and windows, both because they are structural and because they are a security obligation in most states.
Safety equipment is the landlord's to install and, in most jurisdictions, to maintain. Smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors have to exist and have to work. Many states put battery replacement on the tenant during the tenancy while keeping the device itself the landlord's responsibility, which is exactly the kind of split worth naming in the lease rather than assuming.
Common areas in a multi-unit building are the landlord's: hallways, stairs, shared laundry, parking, and exterior grounds. Pest control is usually the landlord's when the problem is building-wide or predates the tenancy, and usually the tenant's when their own conduct caused it. That is a genuinely gray area, and the lease is where you make it less gray.
Normal wear and tear is the landlord's cost of doing business. Carpet that has thinned over six years of ordinary walking, paint that has dulled, a faucet washer that has aged out. None of that is chargeable to a tenant, and treating it as chargeable is one of the faster ways to lose a security deposit dispute.
What the tenant is responsible for
The tenant's side is smaller but not trivial, and it comes down to two things: routine upkeep, and anything they broke.
Routine upkeep means keeping the unit reasonably clean and sanitary, replacing light bulbs, replacing air filters, replacing smoke detector batteries where state law assigns that to the tenant, disposing of trash properly, and not putting things down drains or toilets that do not belong there.
Damage beyond ordinary wear is theirs, and it includes damage caused by guests and by pets. A hole punched in drywall, a cracked window, a door damaged by forcing it, a burn in the countertop. The distinction from normal wear is not about the amount of money involved. It is about whether ordinary use would have produced it.
Anything the tenant brought in is theirs as well. A window air conditioner, a portable dishwasher, a personal washer, any appliance that did not come with the unit.
And there is a third one that landlords underuse: the duty to report. Most leases and many state statutes require the tenant to notify the landlord of problems promptly. That obligation is what makes the next section work.
The unreported problem is where liability shifts
This is the single most useful thing a landlord can explain to a tenant at move-in.
A leak under the sink is the landlord's repair. That does not change. But the cabinet floor that rotted, the subfloor underneath it, and the mold that grew in the dark for four months while nobody said anything are a different question, because that damage was preventable and the tenant was the only person in a position to prevent it by making a phone call.
Two things follow from that, and they cut both ways.
For the tenant, reporting early and in writing is protection. It converts an ambiguous situation into a documented one where the repair obligation is clearly the landlord's.
For the landlord, the protection only exists if the reporting channel is real. If a tenant can plausibly say they mentioned it twice in passing and nothing happened, the timeline is contested and the argument is winnable by either side. If every request arrives through one channel with a timestamp, a description, and photos attached, the timeline is a fact.
That is the practical reason to insist on a single written intake channel, and it matters more than the software used to do it. In Shuk, tenants submit maintenance requests with photos, videos, documents, and notes, and landlords track each request from submission through completion, so the history of a given problem lives in one place instead of across text messages and voicemails. The queue is filterable by property, priority, status, and age, which is what you need in order to see what is aging, and the Maintenance Summary report pulls requests by location, status, and date when you need the whole picture.
Emergencies are a separate category
Emergency repairs are the exception to every normal timeline, and the lease should say what qualifies before anyone has to guess at midnight.
The standard list is short: fire, a suspected gas leak or a carbon monoxide alarm, a burst pipe or active flooding, complete loss of heat in freezing temperatures, no water, no working toilet in a single-bathroom unit, sewage backing up into the unit, an electrical hazard or exposed wiring, a broken exterior lock that leaves the unit unsecured, and standing water or signs of significant mold. Anything with an immediate safety threat is a 911 call first and a maintenance call second. The rest get same-day attention, and in most states a landlord who sits on one is exposed regardless of what the lease says.
A dripping faucet is not an emergency. A dishwasher that has stopped working is not an emergency. Saying so in writing, in advance, is what keeps a Saturday night phone call from becoming a fight about responsiveness.
Give the tenant one emergency number and one non-emergency channel. Ambiguity about which is which is a problem you create for yourself.
Write it into the lease and repeat it at move-in
Everything above is only useful if the tenant encounters it before the first repair, not during it.
A workable maintenance section in the lease covers five things: the categories the landlord handles, the categories the tenant handles, how to submit a non-emergency request and what counts as an emergency, the expected response window for each, and the fact that damage beyond normal wear may be charged to the tenant. Two paragraphs is usually enough. It does not need to read like a statute.
Then say it again at move-in, out loud, and document the unit's condition while you are there. A dated move-in inspection with photographs is what separates a chargeable burn in the countertop from a burn that was there when the tenant arrived. Without it, you are arguing from memory against someone arguing from memory, and the party with the deposit at stake tends to remember more vividly.
Store the lease, the inspection record, and the maintenance history where you can find them in eighteen months. Shuk keeps documents in Property Documents inside each property, and unlimited e-signatures through the Adobe-powered integration mean the signed lease lands in the property's archive rather than in an inbox.
Frequently asked questions
What maintenance is a landlord legally required to cover? Landlords are generally responsible for keeping the unit habitable, which covers plumbing, heating and cooling, electrical, water heating, structural elements, weatherproofing, locks and exterior doors, required safety equipment, common areas, and any major appliances the landlord supplied. Normal wear and tear is also the landlord's cost. Specific standards and repair timelines vary by state and municipality.
What maintenance is the tenant responsible for in a rental? Tenants are typically responsible for routine upkeep and for damage beyond ordinary wear. That means keeping the unit clean, replacing light bulbs and air filters, replacing smoke detector batteries where state law assigns that to the tenant, disposing of trash properly, avoiding drain misuse, maintaining any appliance they brought in themselves, and repairing damage they, their guests, or their pets caused.
Can a landlord charge a tenant for a repair the tenant did not report? Sometimes, and the distinction is preventability. The original repair usually remains the landlord's obligation, but damage that spread because the tenant failed to report a known problem promptly may become the tenant's responsibility. This is why prompt written reporting protects both sides, and why the rules vary by state.
What counts as an emergency maintenance request? The usual list is fire, a suspected gas leak or carbon monoxide alarm, a burst pipe or active flooding, complete loss of heat in freezing temperatures, no running water, no working toilet in a single-bathroom unit, sewage backup, an electrical hazard, a broken exterior lock leaving the unit unsecured, and standing water or significant mold. Everything else is a standard request. Define both categories in the lease so nobody is guessing at midnight.
How should landlords document maintenance requests? Use one written channel so every request carries a timestamp, a description, and photos, and keep the full history of each problem in one place. A documented timeline resolves most disputes about who was told what and when, and it is far more reliable than reconstructing a sequence of text messages months later.
What to do next
The maintenance problems that turn into disputes are rarely the expensive ones. They are the ones where the responsibility was never written down and the reporting never got documented, so two reasonable people end up with two different accounts of the same eight months.
Shuk is built to remove the ambiguity. Tenants submit maintenance requests with photos, videos, documents, and notes, and each request is tracked from submission through completion, so the timeline is a record instead of a recollection. The queue filters by property, priority, status, and age so nothing quietly gets old, and the Maintenance Summary report pulls requests by location, status, and date. Landlord-only maintenance tasks cover preventive work you do not need the tenant to see. Centralized in-app messaging with email and push notifications keeps the conversation attached to the property rather than scattered across personal phones, and Property Documents holds the lease, the move-in inspection, and the receipts where you can retrieve them.
Shuk is billed annually, with volume pricing as low as $2.00 per unit per month, and White Glove Onboarding is included at no additional cost. There is no contract and no lock-in.
Book a demo at shukrentals.com/book-a-demo to see how maintenance request tracking, centralized messaging, and Property Documents work together so a repair question never becomes a dispute about who said what.
