Default and cure periods: what landlords are actually exposed to
Every commercial lease has a default clause, and most landlords only read it closely after something has already gone wrong. By then, what matters most is whether every required step before acting was actually followed.
Monetary defaults move fast, non-monetary ones don't
The two categories work on different clocks. Monetary defaults, meaning unpaid rent or other charges, typically carry a cure period of just 5 to 10 business days after written notice. Non-monetary defaults, like a use violation or a maintenance failure, usually get a longer runway: commonly 30 days after written notice, often with an extension if the tenant is actively working to fix something that can't reasonably be resolved that fast.
The notice step is not optional
Most leases require written notice before a cure period starts running at all, not just before the landlord can act. That ordering matters more than it looks: if a lease requires notice and a cure period before termination or any other remedy, enforceability can hinge on whether that notice was properly given, separate from whether the tenant was actually in default. A default that's real on paper is still worth nothing operationally if it can't be acted on cleanly.
What this actually exposes you to
This is the gap that costs money. A landlord who's confident a tenant is in default but hasn't tracked the notice-and-cure sequence correctly can end up unable to act on it when it matters, stuck covering a vacancy, a non-paying tenant, or an unresolved violation for longer than the lease itself intended, simply because a procedural step was missed.
None of this is legal advice, and cure-period lengths and notice requirements vary by lease and by state. But across multiple properties, tracking exactly which notice has gone out, when, and what clock it started is the kind of detail that's easy to lose in a spreadsheet and expensive to get wrong. RenewSavvy extracts the default and cure terms from every lease, so the sequence is already clear well before a default situation ever comes up.