Handle a lease renewal with a rent increase as one workflow with two instruments. Decide renew or relist early, set the new rent against the market's rules, and serve the increase notice on its own clock where your market prescribes one. Then paper the renewal so the new term starts where the old one ends, and keep the offer, the notice, and the signed agreement on the lease file.
It is the second Friday of October, 4:40 PM. Fourteen leases end between January 1 and March 1, and the renewal push starts Monday. Last winter, one of these files taught the expensive lesson: unit 305's renewal came back signed in February with the higher rent typed into it, and no increase notice had ever been served. In that property's market, the notice is required even when the agreement states the new rent. The signature was an agreement. It was not a notice.
The market-neutral spine of a rent increase, the cadence, the notice floors, the forms, and the service rules, is covered in How and When to Raise Rent: Scheduling and Notice Periods. This guide is the renewal layer: the decision, the offer, the notice, and the new agreement as one workflow, and what the file holds when it is done. Operator education, not legal advice: your market's rules control, and the per-market guides carry them with named official sources.
Renew or relist: the decision that opens the season
The renewal workflow starts with a decision, not a document. For a resident who pays on time and holds the terms, renewal is usually the default: you already know how this tenancy runs, and every turnover you skip is vacant days, make-ready work, marketing, and screening you do not buy. Relisting earns its place when the file argues for it: chronic late payment, damage beyond wear, complaints with dates on them, or a renovation that needs the vacancy.
Two inputs sharpen the call: the gap between the current rent and what the building's own submarket supports, which changes the math on both paths, and what the lease file actually records rather than what memory says. Either way, write the call down with its reasons, so next year's file shows a decision rather than a default. If the answer is relist, the work becomes marketing the vacancy, covered in How to Advertise a Vacant Apartment: Marketing a Unit Online.
The renewal offer and the increase notice are different paper
A lease renewal with a rent increase involves two documents that operators often treat as one. The renewal offer is commercial paper: an invitation to stay, carrying the proposed term, the proposed rent, and a date to respond by. The rent increase notice is legal paper: the instrument your market's rules recognize, on the prescribed form where one exists, served the required number of days ahead, no more often than the market allows. The offer can be an email. The notice is whatever the market says it is.
The two do not substitute for each other. In some markets the notice must be served even when the renewal agreement itself sets out the increase, so a signed renewal with no served notice can leave the old rent as the one lawfully owed; NSW Rent Increases: No Cap, 60 Days' Notice, Once a Year carries a statutory example. Quebec runs the merge in the other direction by design: the landlord's renewal notice is itself the instrument that proposes the new rent, and a refusal renews the lease anyway (Quebec Rent Increases: How the TAL Framework Actually Works). The safe general rule: find out which instrument your market recognizes, serve it on its clock, and let the renewal agreement record what the notice already did.
Side by side, the two instruments:
| The renewal offer | The rent increase notice | |
|---|---|---|
| Job | Invites the resident to stay on stated terms | Makes the increase lawful in a regulated market |
| Form | Yours: a letter or an email | The market's: a prescribed form where one exists |
| Clock | Your respond-by date | The market's notice floor and frequency limit |
| Signature | Leads to an agreement signed by both parties | Signed by the landlord side; the tenant never signs a rent increase notice |
What a lease renewal letter with a rent increase carries
A lease renewal letter with a rent increase does two jobs on one page: it invites the resident to stay, and it states the money plainly. The letter that does both carries the property and unit, the lease it refers to and its end date, the offered term or terms (a further fixed term, month to month, or both, each priced honestly), the current rent, the new rent and its effective date, any other terms that change, the date to respond by, and what happens next on each path. Where your market requires a statutory notice for the increase, the letter accompanies that notice rather than replacing it.
Date the letter, keep a copy on the lease file, and set the respond-by date so that a no still leaves you time to market the unit. An offer with no deadline is not an offer; it is an open question you will be chasing in December.
The renewal workflow, start to finish
One procedure covers the season. Run it per lease, counted backward from each lease's end date:
- Pull the horizon. List every lease ending in the next 90 days, with each property's notice floor and frequency window beside it. The leases with the longest notice floors set the calendar.
- Make the renew-or-relist call. Per lease, on the file's evidence, recorded with its reasons.
- Set the number. Comparables from the building's own submarket, your cost growth, and what retention is worth; in a capped or guideline market, the current cycle's rules bound it.
- Check the increase clocks. The frequency limit and any protected window run on the tenancy, not the paperwork, so count from when rent last moved and when the tenancy began. A renewal does not restart them.
- Serve the increase notice where your market requires one. On the prescribed form where one exists, inside the notice floor, with proof of service kept. In notice markets the notice is unilateral: it protects the increase whether the resident signs a new term or rolls over.
- Send the renewal offer. With the new rent stated and a respond-by date that clears your relisting runway.
- Paper the renewal from the expiring lease. The same parties unless something changed, a start date that meets the old end date without a gap or an overlap, the noticed rent, and any changed terms stated.
- File everything against the lease. The offer, the served notice and its proof, the signed agreement, and the decision notes. Next year's clocks run from what this year's file records.
The paper trail that answers next year's questions
A renewal's paper trail is the operating record the next increase runs on. Frequency limits in many markets are measured across the tenancy, so proving when rent last moved is the first fact any future notice depends on, and the file, not memory, is where that fact has to live. The trail worth keeping: the chain of agreements and which lease renewed which, the rent history with the date each change took effect, each served notice with its proof of service, and the signed agreement for every term.
The terms you re-sign also set future clocks. In some markets, the notice a lease demands of the tenant sets a floor for the notice the landlord must give on an increase; Minnesota Rent Increases: No State Cap, St. Paul's 3 Percent carries a statutory example. The boilerplate you roll forward this year is next year's rulebook, which is a good reason to read it before it renews for another cycle.
Key questions
Should I renew a tenant or relist the unit?
Renew by default when the rent arrives on time and the terms are held: you already know how the tenancy runs, and every avoided turnover saves vacant days, make-ready work, marketing, and screening. Relist when the file argues for it: chronic late payment, damage beyond wear, documented complaints, or a renovation that needs the vacancy. Decide early enough that either path is still open, and write the decision down with its reasons.
When should I send a lease renewal offer?
Start about 90 days before the lease ends, and earlier where the market's rent increase notice period is long: the offer's respond-by date has to sit inside any notice clock you must meet and still leave time to market the unit on a no. Some markets also set their own renewal or continuation rules, so check the lease and the local rulebook before fixing the date. At portfolio scale, a rolling 30, 60, and 90 day horizon beats one annual push.
Can I raise the rent on a lease renewal?
Yes. In most markets the renewal is the natural moment to adjust rent, because a fixed-term lease generally holds its rent until it ends. The increase still runs on the market's rules: any cap or guideline, the frequency limit, and the notice floor all apply, and some markets require the notice to be served even though the renewal agreement states the new rent. How much is a per-market question; the per-market guides carry each rulebook with named official sources.
Should the rent increase go in the renewal agreement or a separate notice?
Both, in a regulated market: the notice does the legal work, and the renewal agreement records the term that follows it. Where a market prescribes a notice instrument, a rent clause in the renewal does not replace serving that instrument on its own clock. Where no notice is prescribed and the lease controls, the renewal agreement can carry the increase on its own. Either way, a dated, signed record of the change is the asset.
Does signing a new lease reset the rent increase rules?
Generally, no. Frequency limits and protected windows in regulated markets are usually measured on the tenancy, the people and the premises, not on the paperwork, so a renewal or replacement agreement does not restart them. A renewal that raises the rent is still a rent increase under the market's rules. Treat the tenancy's history as the clock: when rent last moved and when the tenancy began decide what is lawful next, whatever was recently signed.
How Scaalr runs renewal season
Scaalr treats renewals as a pipeline, not a season-opening scramble. The dashboard counts leases ending within 30, 60, and 90 days, each count opening the filtered leases list, and a lease inside its final 90 days is flagged as expiring. Renewing starts from the expiring lease: the renewal pre-fills the prior lease's terms and its residents, starts the new term the day after the old one ends, and records the lineage on both leases, making the chain of agreements a fact of the record rather than a filing convention. Two warnings stand at exactly the failure points above. Date a renewal to start before the old lease ends, and Scaalr warns that both leases would generate rent across the overlapping days. Raise the rent on a renewal, and it asks you to confirm the increase notice has been served before the renewal saves, or to go back and keep the current amount. Both are warnings, not blocks: you stay the judge, with the question put at the moment it matters. The renewal workflow, the rent history, the lease activity timeline, and the lease's document files, the signed agreement attached as a file, are on every plan.
The increase itself rides the jurisdiction engine (Growth and up). A scheduled increase on the lease resolves the property's market and is validated against that market's profile, the cap or guideline where one exists, the frequency limit, any protected window at the start of a tenancy, and the notice floor, when you schedule it and again before anything serves. A renewal cannot reset the frequency or tenancy clocks: validation reads the tenancy's history across the chain of renewals, one more job for the lineage record. Where the market mandates an official form, Scaalr fills it; where none is prescribed, it composes the notice from the market's rules. Every served notice is signed, by a signer who captured a signature once, a per-notice review, or the property owner through a secure emailed link, and a schedule with no usable signature holds until one exists. When the increase comes due, Scaalr opens a rent-increase case, generates and attaches the notice, serves it by email where the market permits or as a staff record-of-service task where it does not, and records the result. An opt-in setting then moves the lease's rent to the noticed amount on the effective date, so the term you papered and the rent you bill agree without re-keying.
The rent-increases worklist inside Leases shows every eligible lease, its earliest lawful effective date, and each schedule's status, and nothing serves in any market until a manager has reviewed and acknowledged that market's current rules. Automated rent-increase notices cover Scaalr's cataloged markets across the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Ireland; every supported market is listed on the rent increases page. What stays on your desk is what was always yours: the renew-or-relist call and the number. The clocks, the forms, the signatures, and the filing run on the system, for every lease you have rather than the ones somebody remembered.
The second Friday of October, current
Back to the fourteen leases. The worklist already holds each one's earliest lawful date, the schedules you armed carry your rates, and the two notices due first are generated, signed, served, and recorded. The renewal offers go out Monday with respond-by dates that clear your runway. Unit 305's file, this year, reads in order: notice served, offer accepted, renewal signed, lineage recorded. The season is still work. It is no longer archaeology.