How does a Maine landlord lawfully end a tenancy, and when may a tenant leave early?

Landlord: 30 days. Tenant: 30 days.

The notice itself fixes the termination date, and the tenancy is treated as ending when the time fixed in the notice expires, so the 30 days run forward from the day the notice is given and the tenancy may end on any day of the month. One floor sits under that: where the tenant has paid rent through a date on which a 30-day notice would expire, the notice must expire on or after the date through which the rent has been paid. That is a one-way minimum, not an alignment rule, so it can push the end date later but never ties it to a rent-due date or the close of a rental period.

The termination date may fall on any day.

The parties may agree to a different period, including no notice at all. Either party may waive the 30 days in writing, but only at the time the notice is given and at no other time before it. A clause in the lease agreeing in advance to a shorter period, or to none, is therefore ineffective, and a landlord who requires a tenant to sign a lease containing a term that has the effect of waiving a tenant right under these chapters commits an unfair and deceptive trade practice. The waiver runs in both directions, since the same sentence binds landlord and tenant alike.

A statute requires the landlord's and tenant's periods to be equal, or bars a lease from imposing a longer period on one side.

Source of the period: a termination-notice statute states it.

A tenancy at will is ended by either party on a minimum of 30 days' written notice given to the other party, and the same figure binds both sides. Maine has no separate weekly track: the section governs every tenancy at will whatever the rent interval, so a week-to-week tenant and a month-to-month tenant both give and get 30 days. A landlord who has made at least three good-faith attempts to serve the tenant may instead serve by both mailing the notice first class to the tenant's last known address and leaving it at the tenant's last and usual place of abode; the two steps go together, not either one alone. The notice must tell the tenant of the right to contest the termination in court, and since January 1, 2024 the landlord must attach the plain-language form the judicial branch posts on its own website. Accepting money after the notice does not undo the termination, whether the money is for old arrears or for current use and occupation, until a writ of possession issues; the one thing that does undo it is the tenant paying rent that accrued after the tenancy ended. A shorter seven-day notice exists for stated grounds such as substantial damage, a nuisance, seven days or more of rent arrears or a perpetrator of violence against another tenant, and those belong to the eviction page, but the statute lets a seven-day notice and a 30-day notice be combined in one document.

No: no statewide rule requires a reason, and no statute expressly authorizes local ordinances.

Local ordinances: no statute or decision addresses them. No Maine statute preempts local just-cause or eviction ordinances, and none authorizes them either. The background rule is home rule: a municipality may exercise any power the Legislature has power to confer and has not denied expressly or by clear implication, an ordinance enacted under that power is presumed valid, and the Legislature is not treated as having implicitly denied a power unless the ordinance would frustrate the purpose of a state law. On the rent side the picture is the same: the state's municipal rent-control enabling chapter was repealed in 1995 and nothing replaced it, so no statute either grants or withholds the power, and Portland and South Portland have adopted rent regulation under home rule. That axis is covered on the rent-increase page. Individual city ordinances are covered on the locality pages.

No reason is required to end a tenancy at will or to let a fixed term expire in Maine. The landlord gives the 30 days' notice, or lets the term run out, and the tenancy ends. Two narrow bars sit on particular grounds rather than on no-cause termination generally. A landlord may not deny or terminate a lease or tenancy at will because the tenant chose to opt out of an optional recurring fee or stopped paying one. And a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking may not be evicted on the basis of those incidents at the premises, or of reporting them, where they would otherwise be treated as a nuisance, as damage to property, or as a lease violation arising from a nuisance, a disturbance or damage. A separate rebuttable presumption of retaliation reaches a case brought within six months of protected tenant conduct; that rule is on the habitability page.

The term ends on its date; no statute requires notice from either side.

After the term, nothing converts: a holdover creates no new tenancy. No Maine statute converts an expired fixed term into a periodic tenancy, and none says that accepting rent creates one. What the statute does instead is assume the result: a landlord may bring the possession case without notice only if it is started within seven days of the term's expiry, and after that window the occupant is treated as a tenant at will who can be removed only after a 30-day termination notice. The conversion itself is a matter of common law rather than statute.

A fixed term ends on its own date and no statute requires either side to give notice of non-renewal. The catch is on the landlord's side and it is easy to miss: the possession case may be brought without notice only if it is commenced within seven days of the expiration or forfeiture of the term. A landlord who lets that window pass must fall back on the 30-day termination notice for the tenancy at will the occupant has become. A tenant who stays on is not protected by the seven days; it is a filing deadline for the landlord, not a grace period. Maine's automatic-renewal consumer statute does not reach leases: its definition is a closed list covering online magazines, media players, mobile apps, social networking, internet games, online software and health club memberships, so there is no duty to remind a tenant before a renewal clause takes effect.

Maine gives a holdover no statutory label and no special status. The landlord's route is the possession case brought without notice within seven days of the term expiring; after that the occupant is treated as a tenant at will and is entitled to the ordinary 30 days' notice before a case can be brought. Nothing in either chapter creates a tenancy at sufferance or lets the landlord retake the unit without going to court.

Damages: No statutory enhancement: the landlord recovers ordinary rent or use and occupancy.

Maine has no holdover-damages statute at all: no double rent, no treble damages, no liquidated holdover charge and no enhanced measure for a wilful holdover. The landlord recovers the rent and damages actually owed, reduced by the amount the landlord could have obtained by reasonable efforts to re-rent. The only place either chapter uses the phrase about a tenant holding over is a cross-reference in the section voiding a lease of premises used as a house of ill fame, which gives the landlord the same remedy to recover possession, not a damages multiple.

Yes: a statute imposes the duty.

When it attaches: The duty attaches on any unjustified early departure with a rent default, and equally where the tenant is removed for failure to pay rent or for any other breach of the lease or tenancy-at-will agreement. It is not keyed to a finding of abandonment, which Maine does not have. The one thing that ends it is the landlord expressly agreeing to accept a surrender of the premises and end the tenant's liability.

Burden of proof: split, with different elements on each side.

The standard: The recovery is reduced by the net rent obtainable by reasonable efforts to re-rent, and the statute defines the phrase: reasonable efforts means the steps the landlord would have taken to rent the premises if they had been vacated in due course, provided those steps accord with local rental practice for similar properties. The landlord may also recover all reasonable listing and advertising expenses incurred in re-renting and in trying to re-rent, except as already taken into account in computing the net rent. Where the landlord has other similar premises for rent and receives an offer from a prospective tenant the departing tenant did not produce, it is reasonable for the landlord to rent the other unit first. Four acts are expressly privileged and are neither a failure to mitigate nor an acceptance of surrender: entering to inspect, preserve, repair, remodel or show; re-renting the premises or part of them, with the rent applied against the damages; the landlord's own temporary use until re-renting at a reasonable rent is practical, for no more than a year and on prompt written notice crediting the tenant with the reasonable value of that use; and any other act that does not unequivocally demonstrate an intent to release the tenant.

No authority addresses a clause accelerating the remaining rent.

The lease may not waive the duty.

Maine's duty is statutory and it splits the burden of proof in a way few states do. The landlord must allege and prove that efforts to comply were made; the tenant then bears the burden of proving that those efforts were not reasonable, that a refusal of an offer to rent was not reasonable, that the terms on which the landlord did re-rent were not reasonable, and that a temporary use by the landlord was not part of reasonable mitigation. The tenant also bears the burden of proving the amount that could have been obtained. The Law Court applied exactly that division in Camplin v. Rizzo, affirming a directed verdict for a landlord whose own evidence of local rental practice went uncontradicted, and confirmed in a later case that the duty is a residential one: outside a residential tenancy there is no duty to mitigate beyond the lease's own terms. Neither chapter says anything about a clause accelerating the remaining rent. The duty cannot be signed away, because requiring a tenant to accept a term that waives a right under these chapters is itself an unfair and deceptive trade practice.

A statute or appellate decision voids early-termination fees or liquidated damages in a dwelling lease.

Maine does not cap an early-termination fee; it prohibits one. Since January 1, 2025 any provision of a lease, tenancy-at-will agreement or rule for a dwelling unit that requires the tenant to pay a fee, penalty or other charge for the act of discontinuing the tenancy is unenforceable and is itself a violation of the state's unfair trade practices law. Three things are carved out and may still be charged: reasonable expenses of securing another tenant, but only where the tenant broke the lease's own notice requirement; unpaid rent owed to the landlord; and reasonable expenses of repairing damage the tenant caused. Keeping a security deposit for a permitted reason is expressly not a charge for discontinuing the tenancy. The practical result is that a tenant who gives a proper 30 days' notice owes no buy-out sum at all, and a landlord's recovery for an early departure is the ordinary rent-and-damages claim reduced by what reasonable re-renting efforts would have produced. The act creating the bar took effect on a stated date with no clause limiting it to new agreements, so it reaches leases signed before then. Nearby fee rules in the same chapter cap the move-in stack at the first full month's rent plus the deposit plus disclosed mandatory recurring fees, hold a late-payment penalty to no more than four percent of one month's rent and only after 15 days and only if disclosed at signing, ban application and application-review fees while allowing the actual cost of one screening in any 12-month period, and make a lease unenforceable if the landlord never received a signed copy of the total-price disclosure. No administrative rule touches any of this: Maine's residential landlord-tenant law delegates rulemaking to no agency at all.

Early-exit rights by ground: domestic violence and related grounds, a statutory right to end the lease; military service beyond the federal act, the state adds nothing to the federal Servicemembers Civil Relief Act; death of the tenant, no statute; and other statutory grounds.

Domestic violence and related grounds: a victim may end the lease on notice.

Who qualifies: A victim, defined as an individual who has been subject to domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking. Each of the three is defined by cross-reference to named provisions of the criminal code, and the domestic-violence definition reaches conduct against a family or household member or a dating partner. Human trafficking is not a named ground: the definitions are a closed list of criminal-code citations, and while a sex-trafficking offense can qualify because the chapter it sits in is pulled in through the sexual-assault definition, labor trafficking does not qualify. A separate ground on the same footing covers a tenant who is the victim of sexual harassment by the landlord or the landlord's agent.

Separate schemes: Maine runs two victim grounds through one machinery. The first is for a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking. The second is for a tenant who is the victim of sexual harassment by the landlord or the landlord's agent, where sexual harassment is defined to cover unwelcome sexual advances, sexually suggestive remarks or actions, unwanted hugs, touches or kisses, requests for sexual favors, and retaliation for complaining about any of it. Both use the same seven-day and 30-day notice ladder and the same documentation rule, and a separate section makes it unlawful for a landlord or a landlord's agent to subject a tenant to sexual harassment at all.

Documentation: The tenant gives the landlord documentation of the alleged conduct, including the perpetrator's name. The statutory list is open rather than closed: acceptable documentation includes, but is not limited to, a statement signed by a Maine-based sexual assault counselor, a domestic violence advocate or a victim witness advocate; a statement signed by a health care provider, mental health care provider or law enforcement officer, with the license number where the signer is licensed; a copy of a protection from abuse complaint or a temporary or final protection order; a copy of a protection from harassment complaint or order; a copy of a police report prepared in response to an investigation; or a copy of a criminal complaint, indictment or conviction. Changing the locks is expressly exempt from the documentation duty.

Window: There is no recency window. The right is keyed to an incident or threat of domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking with no time limit attached, so an older incident still supports a termination. The only 30-day clock in the victim provisions is a different rule: to keep the cap on liability for damage related to the violence, the victim must give written notice of the damage with the documentation within 30 days of the damage occurring.

Notice: 7 days; the termination takes effect that many days after notice. The period depends on the length of the agreement. A victim in a tenancy at will, or in a lease with a term of less than one year, ends the tenancy on seven days' written notice with the documentation. A victim in a lease with a term of one year or more gives 30 days' written notice with the documentation. Nothing else changes between the two tracks.

Rent owed: Once the written notice is given, the victim is not liable for rent beyond the date the notice expires or the date the victim actually leaves, whichever is later. Rent already prepaid for the month is not refunded. The parallel provision states flatly that a victim is not liable for any unpaid rent under the victim's lease.

Cost to the tenant: No fee, penalty or charge for ending the tenancy may be imposed, because a lease provision charging for the act of discontinuing a tenancy is unenforceable and a victim who gives the statutory notice has not broken the notice requirement that opens the one relevant carve-out. Liability for damage related to the violence is capped at the value of the security deposit, so long as the alleged perpetrator is a tenant and the victim gives written notice of the damage with the documentation within 30 days of it happening. A lock change is at the victim's own expense.

Other tenants on the lease: the perpetrator's tenancy can be ended while the lease continues for the other tenants. What Maine gives is a power to split the tenancy rather than a rule about who stays bound. A landlord may bifurcate a lease or tenancy without regard to whether the household member who is a victim signed it, in order to evict or end the tenancy of a perpetrator of domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking; in doing so the landlord may not interfere with a victim's property rights as a valid court order allocates them, and nothing in the section creates a tenancy that did not already exist. A seven-day for-cause ground backs this up where the tenant is a perpetrator and the victim is also a tenant. What the statute does not say is whether the remaining tenants are released when a victim ends the tenancy: it is silent on that, which is not the same as saying they stay bound.

Locks: The statute lets the tenant change the locks. A victim may change the locks to the unit at the victim's own expense and must give the landlord a duplicate key within 72 hours of the change. This is self-help rather than a request the landlord must grant, and it is the one victim right the documentation rule does not apply to. Any other tenant who changes a lock must notify the landlord first and supply a duplicate key within 48 hours, so the victim's deadline is the longer of the two.

Later screening: no protection against reporting or characterization; a narrower bar applies. There is no bar on how a past victim termination is reported or characterized in later screening, and no bar on refusing to rent to a past victim; that gap is real. What Maine does bar is an eviction of a victim based on incidents of actual or threatened domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking occurring at the premises, or on the victim reporting them to any agency, where they would otherwise be treated as a nuisance, as damage to property, or as a lease violation arising from a nuisance, a disturbance or damage. Two other titles were read for a housing shield and neither supplies one: the protection-from-abuse chapter reaches tenancy only by granting or restoring possession of a jointly owned or jointly leased residence to one party, and the protection-from-harassment chapter says in terms that its order may not be used to evict a defendant from rental premises.

The landlord's side: The landlord may require documentation naming the perpetrator for every victim right except a lock change. Nothing in the victim provisions stops a landlord from evicting a tenant for reasons unrelated to the violence, from bringing a possession case against the tenant who perpetrated it, from obtaining a criminal no-trespass order against a non-tenant who perpetrates violence at the premises, or from holding a perpetrator liable for damage to the property; and the seven-day for-cause grounds are available against a perpetrator-tenant. Maine imposes a confidentiality duty on the advocates who sign the documentation, but none on the landlord who receives it.

A victim of domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking may end the tenancy on seven days' written notice in a tenancy at will or a lease of less than a year, or on 30 days' written notice in a lease of a year or more, in each case with documentation of the conduct that names the perpetrator. The documentation list is open, so an advocate's statement, a provider's or officer's statement, a protection complaint or order, a police report, or a criminal complaint, indictment or conviction all count, and so may something else. There is no time limit tied to the incident. Liability for rent stops at the later of the notice expiring or the tenant leaving, prepaid rent for the month is not returned, no termination charge is enforceable, and damage liability related to the violence is capped at the deposit. A victim may change the locks personally, at the victim's expense, with a duplicate key to the landlord within 72 hours. The landlord may split the tenancy to remove a perpetrator without disturbing the victim's tenancy. A tenant who is the victim of sexual harassment by the landlord or the landlord's agent has the same right on the same terms. Maine has no shield against a past termination surfacing in later screening and imposes no confidentiality duty on the landlord.

Military service: The state adds nothing to the federal Servicemembers Civil Relief Act.

Maine adds no state right for a service member to end a lease early; the tenant's termination right is the federal Servicemembers Civil Relief Act alone. What Maine's defense and veterans title gives instead is a pair of court protections that no secondary summary carries. A possession case may not be brought against premises occupied chiefly for dwelling purposes by a member of the National Guard or the reserves who has been ordered to duty on federal or state orders, or by that member's family members or other dependents, except upon leave of court granted on application. Once such a case is under way the court may stay it, on its own motion or on the member's or family member's motion, where the ability to pay rent is materially affected by the military service, and may make any other just order, including postponing full payment of the rent; the owner may apply for whatever relief the court finds just and equitable, including an order that the arrears be paid on release from service. A second section stays civil actions generally during service and for 60 days after, and records that applying for a stay under it or under the federal act is not an appearance.

Death of the tenant: No statute gives a right to end the lease on the tenant's death.

Other grounds: Two further statutory grounds let a Maine tenant leave, and two rules that look like grounds are not. A tenant who is the victim of sexual harassment by the landlord or the landlord's agent may end the lease on the same seven-day or 30-day ladder as a victim of domestic violence, with the same documentation. And where a written residential lease or contract contains no provision for terminating the tenancy, or no provision for written notice of termination on a material breach, a tenant may end the tenancy on seven days' written notice if the landlord has substantially breached the agreement; the same three-attempts-then-mail-and-post service route runs against the landlord in that case. A casualty is not a termination ground: where the building is destroyed or damaged by fire or other unavoidable casualty so that it is unfit for use or habitation, no action lies for rent or for breach during that period, and in a residential tenancy a lease clause saying otherwise is unenforceable, but the tenancy itself continues. An illegal eviction, meaning a utility shut-off, a lockout or a seizure of the tenant's property, gives the tenant actual damages or $250, whichever is greater, with costs and fees, but no right to terminate. Maine has no age, disability, care-facility, senior-housing or job-relocation early-termination right. Ending a tenancy because the unit is not fit for human habitation is covered on the habitability page, where the court hearing a nonpayment case may let the tenant end the agreement without prejudice.

No statute treats absence as ending the tenancy; the common law governs.

Maine has no abandonment rule that ends a tenancy. There is no presumption from a stated absence, no notice of belief of abandonment, and no absence-plus-unpaid-rent trigger. A landlord who believes the tenant has gone must still serve the 30-day termination notice and, if the unit is not given up, bring a possession case. The only statutory abandonment comes after judgment: once a constable or sheriff has served the writ of possession and the defendant has not removed himself or his possessions within 48 hours, the defendant is deemed a trespasser without right and the goods are considered abandoned. That converts the occupant's status after the case is over and routes the belongings into the disposal rules; it does not give a landlord a way to end a tenancy without going to court. What happens to property left behind, including the storage duty and the minimum time the tenant has to claim it, is covered separately from this page.

The termination notice is given in writing to the other party, so handing it over in person is the primary method. A landlord or landlord's agent who has made at least three good-faith attempts to serve the tenant may instead serve by both mailing the notice first class to the tenant's last known address and leaving it at the tenant's last and usual place of abode. The two steps are conjunctive: mailing alone or posting alone is not service. The same route runs the other way where a tenant is ending the tenancy for the landlord's substantial breach of a written lease. Anyone authorized to enter into a residential lease or tenancy-at-will agreement on the owner's behalf counts as the owner's agent for receiving notices and demands. These are the rules for the termination notice itself; the summons and complaint that start a possession case are served under the ordinary civil rules and belong to the eviction page.

Electronic delivery: the termination statute is silent on it.

What the notice must contain: Maine asks more of a termination notice than most states. The notice must include language advising the tenant of the right to contest the termination in court; leaving it out is not a ground to dismiss the possession case, but where the tenant did not appear it is enough on its own to set aside a default judgment against the tenant. Since January 1, 2024 the landlord must also attach to the notice the form the judicial branch posts on its public website, a one-page to two-page plain-language notice describing the court procedure, including what must happen before a tenant has to leave, and warning that failing to appear may lead to judgment for the landlord. A no-cause 30-day notice does not have to state a reason. A seven-day for-cause notice must state the specific ground claimed, and one given for rent arrears must state the amount seven days or more in arrears and carry the statutory reinstatement paragraph, though an unintentional clerical error that does not significantly or materially alter the purpose or understanding of the notice will not spoil it.

Maine's own chapter hands one question straight to federal law. A bona fide tenancy in a building for which a foreclosure action is pending or a foreclosure judgment has been entered may be terminated only under the federal Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act of 2009, so Maine has no post-foreclosure notice period of its own and the federal 90 days, plus the remainder of a bona fide lease, is the whole rule. Separately, a landlord's failure to provide a reasonable accommodation, whether the duty arises under the Maine Human Rights Act or under the federal Fair Housing Act, is an affirmative defense that requires the court to deny possession where the landlord had the duty, failed it, and there is a causal link between the accommodation requested and the conduct the case is about.

The federal CARES Act 30-day notice to vacate for covered properties, as read in this state's courts: no state appellate decision construes it. No Maine appellate decision construes the CARES Act's 30-day notice for covered dwellings. The federal provision has not been repealed or amended, so it applies of its own force to covered dwellings in Maine, and a reader will meet no state authority on the question that has divided courts elsewhere about whether it lapsed. (Appellate picture read as of September 3, 2026.)

Camplin v. Rizzo, 585 A.2d 817 (Me. 1991) (Maine Supreme Judicial Court; a general statement of law; bears on the duty to re-let): Applying the statutory mitigation duty, the court held that the landlord is charged by statute with proving that efforts to re-rent were made, while the burden of proving that the efforts actually undertaken were unreasonable falls on the tenant. A directed verdict for the landlord was affirmed where the landlord and two brokers testified that the re-letting efforts accorded with local rental practice and the tenants offered no evidence to the contrary. The opinion does not say whether the tenancy was residential, and the duty it applies is the residential one by its placement in the statute.

H&B Realty, LLC v. JJ Cars, LLC, 2021 ME 14 (Maine Supreme Judicial Court; arose from a commercial lease; bears on the duty to re-let): In a dispute over a commercial lease, the court held that there is no duty to mitigate outside the terms of a lease when that lease is commercial, citing the mitigation statute together with the section that carves commercial tenancies out of the residential subchapter. The decision matters here for the boundary it draws rather than for its own facts: it confirms that Maine's statutory mitigation duty is a residential rule.