Military Clause in a Lease- Should I Offer One - Must I Offer One?

Landlords often ask me if they have to provide military clauses in their leases for those members of the military who might need it. Often, they are unclear on exactly what a military clause is, and why they should provide one.

Commonly, there is a situation where one family member has been deployed and the spouse wants to rent an apartment in the States, but wants a military clause so that they will be free to move to where their family member is stationed, if that becomes possible. Alternatively, a member of the armed forces wants to rent a place but might find it necessary to move on very short notice because of a deployment.

A military clause is a lease clause that gives a member of the US Armed Forces the right to break a lease on short notice if that is required by military necessity - typically due to a deployment or a permanent change of station.

You are under no legal obligation to offer a military clause. However, those who are in the military and might otherwise rent from you are often forbidden by their organizations to sign a lease at a location that won't provide a military clause.

The reason is that the military is very demanding of its personnel in their dealings with civilian business people, and insists that they obey all provisions of their contracts. A military person who is subject to deployment would therefore find themselves with a potential conflict, in that they could not deploy due to their contract with you. This also applies to families; for many locations of course the family deploys with the person who is in the service.

Consequently, those who could be deployed are generally forbidden from renting without a military clause.

Now, I will usually jump at the chance to rent to military personnel or military dependants. They tend to be very good tenants, and if you have a problem, you just go to the Commanding Officer and it gets fixed. The only risk is that they might move on short notice, and realistically you always face that risk with tenants - lease notwithstanding.

I had several military tenants when Desert Storm began. They all were deployed, but all of them elected to not exercise their military clauses because they did not expect to be gone long. For awhile, rents arrived sporadically from those people, but I went with it because, after all, we were fighting a war. One tenant, though, became a problem. She flew C-5As back and forth between the States and Saudi Arabia, and the rents just stopped arriving. Finally, I called her CO and asked about it. I put it very politely, because I knew what she was doing, and did not want to be too difficult to deal with, but I needed the money.

Her rent arrived like clockwork after that.

When you rent to military personnel, practically the only risk you run is that they will get deployed.

Jim Locker holds advanced degrees in physics, has designed and developed computer systems and software for over 30 years, and was a landlord for 20 years running up to a couple of hundred properties. He can build or fix pretty much anything. He presently works as an independent computer systems consultant and works for Just So Software, Inc. which produces one of the industry's premier property management software packages.

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