Lease Agreement Review: 9 Clauses That Decide What You Actually Pay

A lease is the longest financial commitment most small businesses sign, and it is signed under time pressure, on the landlord’s paper, by someone who wants the keys. The rent is the number everyone negotiates. The clauses below are where the rest of the money is.

---

1. What the rent actually is

Check: is the headline figure the whole payment?

Service charges, insurance rent, a share of common-area maintenance, management fees, and a deposit. On a commercial lease these routinely add 20–40% to the number you agreed. Ask for the last two years’ actual service charge, not the estimate.

---

2. How it goes up

Check: is the review mechanism defined, and is it capped?

“Upward only” review means the rent can rise and never fall. Indexed to inflation with no ceiling means an inflationary year sets your cost for the remaining term. A fixed percentage is predictable and usually the best outcome for a tenant.

The words to look for are upward only, open market, and index-linked.

---

3. Repairs — the expensive one

Check: whose obligation is the roof?

A full repairing and insuring lease puts the building’s condition on the tenant, including things that were already worn out when you arrived. On a short lease of an old building this is the clause that costs the most and gets read the least.

Ask for a schedule of condition attached to the lease, photographed and dated. Without it, “repair” means “return it in good condition”, not “return it as you found it”.

---

4. Dilapidations at the end

Check: what state must it be in when you leave?

A reinstatement obligation can require removing every alteration you made, including ones the landlord approved. Bills arriving in the final quarter of a lease are routinely five figures and routinely unexpected.

---

5. Break rights

Check: can you leave early, and what makes the break fail?

Break clauses usually carry conditions — notice served in a specific way by a specific date, rent paid up, vacant possession, no breaches. Miss any one and the break is void and you are in for the full term. The conditions are the clause; the right to break is the headline.

---

6. Assignment and subletting

Check: can you hand it to someone else if the business changes?

A flat prohibition on assignment means you cannot sell the business as a going concern in that location. “Landlord’s consent not to be unreasonably withheld” is the normal position and worth insisting on.

---

7. Permitted use

Check: does the use clause cover what you will do in three years?

Narrowly drafted use clauses (“as a bakery and no other purpose”) stop you adapting, and stop you assigning to anyone doing something else. Ask for the broadest category the landlord will accept.

---

8. Renewal

Check: what happens at the end of the term?

An option to renew, statutory protection, automatic rollover, or nothing at all. If it is nothing, you are negotiating from zero with a business that cannot easily move — which is the weakest position there is.

---

9. What is attached

Check: are the plans, schedules and inventory actually there?

A lease that refers to “the Premises shown edged red on the attached plan” with no plan attached is a boundary dispute waiting to be had. The same goes for the inventory on a furnished letting.

If the schedules arrived as separate files, merge them into one document before you sign, so the signed version is complete.

---

Do the check in half a minute first

Reading a forty-page lease properly takes an evening. Knowing where to spend the evening takes about thirty seconds:

Upload it for a free review — six scores out of ten with the reasoning for each, plus a count of the concrete weaknesses found. Free, no account.

Read Balance of Terms first. Landlords’ standard forms are drafted for landlords, and this is the score that says by how much.

If the lease arrived as a scan, make it searchable first — otherwise nothing can read it, including you with Ctrl+F.

---

The one thing worth a lawyer

Everything above is worth checking yourself. Two things are worth paying for: the repairing obligation on any building over about twenty years old, and the break clause conditions if you are relying on being able to leave.

Both are cheaper to get right before signature than to argue about at the end of the term.

---

Next step: review your lease → — free, no account.