The 9 clauses every commercial lease should have
If you've only got a handful of properties and no in-house legal team, a commercial lease can feel like 40 pages of boilerplate with a few numbers buried somewhere in the middle. In practice, almost everything that actually matters to your income, your liability, and your ability to get out of a bad deal lives in a small set of clauses. Here are the nine worth knowing, in plain English.
1. Rent and rent escalation
The base rent is obvious. The escalation clause is the part that quietly determines what you're actually collecting three years from now: a fixed annual increase, a percentage bump, or an index tied to CPI. Fixed and CPI-indexed escalation protect you differently, and the difference compounds over a multi-year term.
2. Premises description and permitted use
This defines exactly what space the tenant is leasing (address, square footage, boundaries) and what they're allowed to do with it. A permitted-use clause that's too broad can limit your options with other tenants later. A wide-open grant to one tenant can make it hard to enforce an exclusivity clause with someone else, or keep the rest of the property's tenants complementary rather than competing.
3. Lease term and renewal
The start and end date, plus whether the tenant has an option to renew and on what terms. This is also where "holdover" language lives: what happens if a tenant simply stays past the lease end date without signing a new agreement, which varies by state.
4. Repair and maintenance responsibility
Who fixes what. Commercial leases typically split this by category (structural repairs, HVAC, interior finishes), and getting the split wrong, or not noticing it was already wrong, is a common source of disputes down the line.
5. CAM (Common Area Maintenance) charges
If the property has shared spaces (a parking lot, a lobby, shared hallways), CAM charges are how tenants pay their share of keeping those areas running, on top of base rent. CAM is one of the most common sources of billing disputes in commercial leasing, mostly because the formula for calculating a tenant's share, and what's actually included in "CAM," isn't always as clear as it should be.
6. Assignment and subletting
Can the tenant hand the lease off to someone else, or bring in a subtenant, without your sign-off? Most leases require landlord consent for both, but the exact conditions under which you can withhold that consent (and what counts as "unreasonable") is worth reading closely rather than assuming.
7. Default and cure periods
What counts as a default (late rent, a lease violation), and how much time does the tenant get to fix it before you can act? This is the clause that actually determines what you're exposed to when something goes wrong: late fees, sure, but also how long you could be stuck with a non-paying tenant if you miss a required notice or cure step.
8. Insurance and indemnity
Most commercial leases require the tenant to carry liability insurance and name the landlord as an additional insured, plus an indemnity clause that shifts liability for incidents in the leased space away from you. Insurance certificate deadlines are easy to lose track of across multiple properties, which is exactly the kind of thing that looks fine until a certificate lapses and nobody notices.
9. Personal guaranty
If your tenant is a small business, you may have required the owner to personally guarantee the lease. That means if the business fails, the individual is on the hook for the remaining rent, not just the (possibly now-defunct) LLC. Personal guaranties sometimes include a "burn-off" provision, where the guaranty shrinks or disappears entirely after the tenant has paid on time for a set period. If you don't know whether yours has one, it's worth finding out before you assume you're covered for the full term.
None of this is legal advice, and it isn't a substitute for having an attorney review your actual lease. State law varies, and the clauses above are just a starting point for what to look for in your own lease. But if you're the one responsible for tracking all nine of these across more than one property, on top of everything else running a small portfolio involves, that's exactly the problem RenewSavvy exists to help with: upload the lease, and we'll pull out the dates and terms that matter, with the source clause shown right next to each one so you can verify it yourself.