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

Landlord: 30 days. Tenant: 30 days.

Two things have to be satisfied at once, and only one of them is in the statute. The statute sets the length: at least the interval between the days rent is payable, or 30 days, whichever is longer. Case law construing the same section adds the endpoint: the notice must fix the termination for a day on which rent is payable. So for an ordinary monthly tenancy the 30 days is a minimum, not a schedule. A notice served in the middle of a month cannot end the tenancy 30 days later; it has to run to the next rent day that is at least a full interval away, which in practice makes the real period between 30 and 60 days. The termination date does not have to be written as a calendar date; it is enough that it is described in general terms a landlord and tenant can reasonably understand as fixing a day certain. Where a no-fault tenancy at will ends some other way than by a party's notice, a separate section bars a possession case until the same interval or 30 days, whichever is longer, has run from the time the tenant receives written notice.

The termination date must fall on a rental-period boundary or a rent-due date.

Tiers: The statutory default is three months' notice for an estate at will. The shorter figure applies only where the rent reserved is payable at periods of less than three months, and then the notice is sufficient if it equals the interval between the days of payment or 30 days, whichever is longer. So a monthly tenancy takes 30 days, a weekly tenancy also takes 30 days rather than seven, a tenancy with rent payable every two months takes 60 days, and a tenancy with rent payable quarterly or less often takes the full three months. Rooming and lodging houses run on a different track. Occupancy of a unit in a licensed rooming or lodging house for three consecutive months makes the occupant a tenant at will; occupancy for more than 30 consecutive days but less than three months, and occupancy of a fraternity, sorority or educational dormitory for any length of time, may be ended on seven days' written notice from the operator. Where rent in a rooming house is payable weekly or daily, a possession case may be brought seven days after written notice.

A lease may not change the period. Any provision of a residential lease or rental agreement by which the tenant agrees, in whatever words, to waive the notices required by the two notice sections is against public policy and void. The bar is specific to those two sections rather than chapter-wide, and it protects the tenant's entitlement to receive the notice; a landlord cannot contract for a shorter period or for none.

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.

Either party may end an estate at will by written notice given for that purpose to the other, and the same ladder applies to both: three months by default, or the rent interval or 30 days, whichever is longer, where rent is payable at intervals shorter than three months. The notice must fix the termination for a rent day. It may also include an offer to establish a new tenancy of the same premises on different terms, and the statute says in so many words that including the offer does not affect the notice's validity, so a landlord may combine a termination with a proposed rent increase in one document. A second section covers everything else that ends a no-fault dwelling tenancy at will, whether by operation of law or by the landlord's act: no possession case may be brought until the same interval or 30 days, whichever is longer, has run from the time the tenant receives written notice of the termination, and the tenant owes rent at the old rate for whatever part of that period the tenant stays. That section also says a dwelling tenancy at will is not ended by the owner conveying, transferring or leasing the premises or by foreclosure, and a companion section deems a tenant holding under an unexpired term at the time of a foreclosure sale to be a tenant at will. Filing a possession case before the notice period has run is itself an unfair and deceptive practice under the Attorney General's regulations.

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

Local just-cause or eviction-control ordinances: expressly preempted by statute. Massachusetts names local eviction regulation as preempted, but only as part of a rent-control scheme. Chapter 40P defines rent control to mean any regulation that in any way requires below-market residential rents, and any regulation that is part of a regulatory scheme of rent control, expressly including the regulation of occupancy, services, evictions, condominium conversion and the removal of properties from the scheme; publicly owned, publicly subsidized and federally assisted housing and mobile homes are outside the definition. No city or town may enact, maintain or enforce rent control of any kind, and even a municipality that accepts the chapter and adopts a permitted scheme may not regulate occupancy, services, evictions, condominium conversion or removal within it. What the chapter does not name is a free-standing municipal ordinance requiring cause to evict that is untied to rent regulation, and several measures before the Legislature would create an express local option for exactly that. The rent-regulation posture is on the rent-increase page.

No Massachusetts statute requires a landlord to have a reason to end an ordinary residential tenancy or to let a fixed term expire. The landlord gives the statutory notice, or lets the term run out, and the tenancy ends. What actually constrains a no-fault termination here is the retaliation rule rather than a cause requirement: receiving a notice of termination other than for nonpayment, a notice of rent increase, or notice of any substantial alteration in the terms of the tenancy within six months after the tenant took protected action creates a rebuttable presumption of reprisal, and that presumption can be rebutted only by clear and convincing evidence that the landlord had sufficient independent justification and would have acted the same way at the same time regardless. Damages run from one to three months' rent or the actual damages, whichever is greater, and a lease waiver of the rule is void. That rule is carried on the habitability page. One narrow regime does require cause: before evicting an occupant of a residential care and services program licensed, funded or operated by the Department of Mental Health that does not meet the statutory conditions, the provider must give written notice of the grounds with the reasons, relevant facts and the sources of those facts, and offer a hearing before an impartial hearing officer held between four and 14 business days later, at which the provider bears the burden of proving the propriety of the eviction by a preponderance of the evidence. An eviction is proper there if the occupant has substantially violated an essential provision of a written occupancy agreement or is likely, despite reasonable accommodation, to impair the emotional or physical well-being of other occupants, staff or neighbors, and the decision may be appealed to the Superior Court. That is a program-occupancy regime for occupants the summary-process chapter does not reach, not a landlord-tenant cause requirement.

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

After the term, no statute governs conversion; the common-law rule applies. No statute converts a Massachusetts holdover into a periodic tenancy, and whether one arises is a question of fact rather than a presumption. The common-law rule is that a tenant at sufferance must go without notice on the landlord's entry, but that if the landlord permits the tenant to remain, and especially if the landlord receives rent, the tenant becomes a tenant at will entitled to notice. Continued occupation after the term ends with the landlord's knowledge and consent, together with payment and receipt of rent at the same rate and on the same rent days as the lease required, is evidence sufficient to show an agreement for a tenancy at will. It is not conclusive, because a separate section independently makes a tenant at sufferance liable for rent, so accepting money proves less here than it does elsewhere. Whether a new tenancy exists is decided on all the testimony and the surrounding circumstances.

A fixed term ends by its own limitation and no statute requires either side to give notice of non-renewal; the summary-process chapter treats holding possession without right after a lease has ended by its own limitation as a ground for recovering possession, which is the whole mechanism. What matters practically is what the holdover becomes. If the landlord acts promptly the occupant is a tenant at sufferance and can be removed through the court without further notice. If the landlord lets the occupant stay and takes rent on the old terms, a tenancy at will may have arisen on the facts, and that tenancy can then be ended only on the statutory notice. Massachusetts has no statute requiring a landlord to remind a tenant before an automatic-renewal clause takes effect; the state's consumer rules on recurring charges reach dwelling units only through a total-price advertising rule.

A tenant who stays past the end of a tenancy is a tenant at sufferance, and the statute says only that tenants at sufferance in possession are liable to pay rent for such time as they occupy or detain the premises. The landlord's route is summary process; excluding a tenant or depriving a tenant of full use of the unit without first obtaining a valid writ of execution for possession is an unfair and deceptive practice. Whether the occupant has instead become a tenant at will again, and so is owed a termination notice, is the fact question described in the fixed-term row.

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

Massachusetts has no holdover-damages statute: no double rent, no treble damages, no liquidated holdover charge and no enhanced measure for a bad-faith holdover. The landlord recovers the ordinary rent for the period the tenant occupies or detains the premises, and nothing more on that account. What a landlord may keep from a tenant who leaves early is separately constrained by the Attorney General's regulations, described in the fee row.

Yes: an appellate decision imposes the duty; no statute does.

When it attaches: The duty runs with any claim for unpaid rent after a tenancy has been terminated or a tenant has broken the lease; no statute conditions it on abandonment or on an election of remedies. A landlord who declines the surrender and tells the tenant that the unit will be re-let for the tenant's account has not accepted a surrender, so the tenant's rent obligation continues, reduced by what the new tenancy brings in less the expenses of re-letting. Acceptance of a surrender is inferred from a landlord exercising control over the property in a way inconsistent with resuming the old tenancy, such as changing the locks or altering the premises, and conduct the lease itself authorizes cannot be read as a surrender.

Burden of proof: decisions disagree.

The standard: The landlord must exercise due diligence to re-let, and the outer limit of that duty is a question of law rather than one for a jury: a landlord is not obliged to let the premises for a longer term or to bundle other premises with them in order to get them let. In the commercial line the same idea is put as making a commercially reasonable new lease and being diligent in obtaining a reasonably fair rent. Simply showing that the unit stayed empty is not enough; the landlord has to show the vacancy was in no respect due to the landlord's own negligence.

No authority addresses a clause accelerating the remaining rent.

Whether a lease may waive the duty is not settled.

There is no mitigation statute in Massachusetts; the duty comes from the courts, and it is old and settled. The Supreme Judicial Court held in 1908 that a landlord suing for rent after a tenancy ends must show not only that the premises stayed unoccupied but that this was in no respect due to the landlord's own negligence, and that the burden of showing due diligence in re-letting rests on the landlord. In 1992 the Appeals Court, in a commercial case, put the burden the other way, saying that proving the landlord had not made a commercially reasonable lease fell on the tenants. In 2014, in a residential case, the Appeals Court set the two side by side and said in terms that the case law is uncertain on the point. So a landlord suing after a tenant leaves early must reckon with a mitigation requirement, and re-letting for the tenant's account does not release the tenant; who has to prove diligence is genuinely open, and this page does not pick a side. Nothing in either chapter addresses a clause accelerating the remaining rent, and no decision reviewed here treats acceleration in a dwelling lease; the Attorney General's regulations cut against charging rent for a period the tenant was not obliged to occupy and did not occupy, unless the parties agreed otherwise in writing.

No statute addresses a fee a landlord may charge for ending a lease early; the general damages rules govern.

No Massachusetts statute authorizes, caps or bars a fee for ending a residential lease early, and neither the estates chapter nor the summary-process chapter mentions a buy-out or a re-letting charge. The rules that do bite come from the Attorney General's consumer-protection regulations, which carry the force of law through the state's unfair trade practices statute. It is an unfair and deceptive practice for an owner to retain, as damages for a tenant's breach of lease or for a prospective tenant's failure to sign after applying, any amount exceeding the damages the owner is entitled to under the law or the amount the parties otherwise agreed as damages. It is separately an unfair and deceptive practice to require payment of rent for periods during which the tenant was not obligated to occupy and did not in fact occupy the unit, unless the parties agreed otherwise in writing. Read together, those two rules route a landlord's claim back through the mitigation offset and make over-collection actionable in its own right. The same regulation also bars any interest or penalty for late rent unless the payment is 30 days overdue. The Attorney General's newer fee regulations were read as well and reach dwelling units only through a total-price advertising rule, so they set no early-termination charge either way.

Early-exit rights by ground: domestic violence and related grounds, a statutory right to end the lease; military service beyond the federal act, state orders or National Guard duty are covered; 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 tenant or co-tenant may act where a member of the household is a victim of domestic violence, rape, sexual assault or stalking. Each ground is a closed definition. Domestic violence means attempting to cause or causing physical harm, placing another in fear of imminent serious physical harm, or causing another to engage involuntarily in sexual relations by force, threat or duress, between family or members of a household. Rape, sexual assault and stalking are defined by reference to named criminal statutes, and criminal harassment counts as stalking. The victim need not be the tenant: it is enough that a household member is one, and the right belongs to the tenant or co-tenant. Tenant is defined to include a person who remains on the premises after the tenancy has ended or the lease has expired. Human trafficking is not a named ground.

Documentation: The owner has the right to request proof of victim status, including the perpetrator's name if known, and the list of acceptable proof is closed at three items: a copy of a valid abuse-prevention or harassment-prevention order obtained by the tenant, co-tenant or household member; a record from a federal, state or local court or from law enforcement of the act, with the perpetrator's name if known; or a written verification from a qualified third party to whom the act was reported, naming the organization, agency, clinic or provider and the date, and the perpetrator if known. On the third route an adult victim who has the capacity to do so must also give a statement under penalty of perjury that the incident described is true and correct. Qualified third party is itself a long defined list: police officers and law-enforcement professionals including prosecutors, victim-witness advocates and probation or parole officers; employees of the state criminal justice information services victim services unit; address-confidentiality program assistants; licensed medical providers; direct-service employees and designated advocates of the child welfare and transitional assistance departments; licensed social workers and mental health professionals; and sexual assault or domestic violence counselors.

Window: 90 days; the incident or documentation must fall within that window before the notice. The written notification must be made within three months of the most recent act of domestic violence, rape, sexual assault or stalking. There is a second route with no time limit at all: the right is equally available where a member of the tenant's household is reasonably in fear of imminent serious physical harm from any of those four things. A summary that gives only the three months states half the rule.

Notice: Massachusetts states no notice period. What the statute requires is written notification to the owner, not a number of days' warning, and the tenancy can be ended as soon as that notification is given. The clock that matters runs the other way and is set out in the deadline row: the tenant has three months from the notification to actually leave.

Rent owed: The tenant or co-tenant is discharged from liability for rent or use and occupancy for 30 days or one full rental period after the quitting date, whichever comes last, to the extent the lease and other law would otherwise impose liability past that date. The wording matters: the provision caps liability that already exists rather than creating any. Prepaid rent for any period after that is refunded, and the statement of any deposit retained, with any refund due, must come within 30 days of the conclusion of the tenancy and delivery of full possession. The quitting date is defined: for a tenant who has already left, the date notice is given to the owner of the intent to abandon the premises and not return; for one who has not, either the date the tenant intends to leave or the date the tenant actually leaves after giving that notice.

Cost to the tenant: No fee or penalty may be charged for the termination itself. The one charge the statute allows is for a lock change, and it is capped: the fee may not exceed the reasonable price customarily charged for changing such locks in that community.

Other tenants on the lease: the lease continues for the other tenants. No other tenant or co-tenant who is a party to the rental agreement is released from their obligations under it or under the chapter. Two further rules travel with that. Belongings the terminating tenant leaves behind are deemed abandoned and may be disposed of under applicable law unless that tenant states in writing who is responsible for them. And an owner who in good faith brings an action against a remaining tenant, co-tenant or household member, or a subsidy provider who terminates or denies a subsidy to one, is not exposed to a retaliation claim or any other claim under the chapter on that account.

Locks: The victim may require the landlord to change the locks. The statute puts a duty on the owner first and gives the tenant a self-help remedy if the owner does not perform. On the request of a tenant, co-tenant or household member who reasonably believes there is an imminent threat of domestic violence, rape, sexual assault or stalking at the premises, the owner must change the locks of that unit, and must make a good faith effort to change them, or give permission for the requester to change them, within two business days, providing a key to the requester as soon as possible within the same two business days. If the owner fails within that window the requester may change the locks without the owner's permission, doing the work in a workmanlike manner with locks of similar or better quality and giving the owner a key within two business days where the lease requires the owner to hold one. Where the threat comes from a tenant, co-tenant or household member, the owner may change the locks and refuse a key to the alleged perpetrator on a request accompanied by a valid protection order against that person or a court or law-enforcement record of the imminent threat. The requester must not voluntarily give the new key to the perpetrator, and an owner who refuses a key on a reasonable belief that the person is the perpetrator is not liable for it. An owner who obstructs the process owes actual and consequential damages or three months' rent, whichever is greater, plus costs and fees, all of which may be applied in setoff or recoupment against a claim for rent, unless the court finds the owner acted in good faith. A lock-change fee is allowed but capped at the reasonable local price.

Later screening: a landlord may not deny, refuse to renew, or terminate because of victim status or a past victim-status termination. An owner may not refuse to enter into a rental agreement, and a housing subsidy provider may not deny assistance, because an applicant once ended a rental agreement under the victim section or once requested a lock change under it. That is the shape of the protection: a bar on refusing to rent and on denying a subsidy, reaching applicants as well as tenants. It is not a bar on a screening service reporting or characterizing the past termination, which Massachusetts does not address.

The landlord must keep the victim's documentation or status confidential.

Deadline to move out: The tenant, co-tenant or any household member who is not the perpetrator must actually leave within three months of the written notification to the owner. Missing that deadline is fatal: if the tenant or co-tenant does not quit within the three months, the notice terminating the rental agreement or tenancy is void, and the tenancy continues as though it had never been given. This is the most consequential operational fact in the section and the one most often reported wrong.

The landlord's side: The owner may request proof of victim status and must keep it confidential. Beyond that the statute gives an owner substantial protection for acting in good faith: an owner complying with the victim sections, or with the requirements of a protection order or any other law, is relieved of liability to the departing tenant, co-tenant or household member and to any third party for that good-faith compliance, and damages are not imposed where the court finds the matter was a good-faith dispute; an owner who shows a good-faith effort to comply is not liable for multiple damages or attorneys' fees. An owner also has good-faith immunity for actions against those who remain and for refusing a key to a person reasonably believed to be the perpetrator. On the other side, the Superior, Housing, District and Boston Municipal Courts have equity jurisdiction to restrain violations, the retaliation presumptions apply to a lock-change request, an owner must not interfere with an order requiring a tenant or household member to vacate and must comply with a lock-change request in that situation, and any lease waiver of the victim sections is void and unenforceable.

A tenant or co-tenant may end the tenancy and leave on written notification to the owner that a member of the household is a victim of domestic violence, rape, sexual assault or stalking, made within three months of the most recent act, or at any time where a household member is reasonably in fear of imminent serious physical harm from one of those things. There is no notice period; what there is instead is a three-month deadline to actually leave, and a tenant who misses it loses the termination entirely because the notice becomes void. Rent liability is discharged for 30 days or one full rental period after the quitting date, whichever comes last, to the extent the lease would otherwise impose it, with prepaid rent for any later period refunded. The owner may ask for proof from a closed list of three kinds, must keep it confidential, and may charge no more than the customary local price for a lock change. Other tenants on the lease stay bound. The owner must change the locks on request within two business days where a household member reasonably believes there is an imminent threat, and the requester may do it personally if the owner does not. And an owner may not refuse to rent, nor a subsidy provider deny assistance, because an applicant once used either right.

Military service: State orders or National Guard duty are covered.

When the state rights attach: The protections attach to members of the armed forces of the commonwealth, including the state defense force, the state staff and those residing in the state pursuant to military service, and to members of another state's or territory's armed forces who reside in Massachusetts, in each case when ordered to active duty under the state militia chapter, under another state's or territory's authority, or under Title 32 of the United States Code. Two adjustments travel with the incorporation: the federal life-insurance provisions are carved out, and the federal act's cumulative five-year cap on state military service is extended to eight years.

Massachusetts brings the whole federal Servicemembers Civil Relief Act into state law for its own service members, and because the carve-outs are only the life-insurance provisions, the federal lease-termination right comes with it. The practical effect is that a National Guard member on state active duty or Title 32 orders, or a member of another state's forces living here, gets the termination right the federal act would otherwise reserve to federal service. Enforcement is a state action for damages and equitable or declaratory relief, and it carries a trap for landlords: at least 30 days before filing, the service member must mail a written demand for relief to the prospective respondent identifying the claimant as a service member and reasonably describing the harm, and failing to respond within 30 days of receipt counts as a denial. Recovery is actual damages or $1,000, whichever is greater, and where the act complained of was wilful or knowing, or the refusal to grant relief on demand was made in bad faith, the greater of $5,000 or three times the damages; the state's unfair trade practices remedies are preserved on top. The adjutant general and the Attorney General perform the roles the federal act assigns to the secretary concerned and to the attorney general.

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

Other grounds: One further statutory ground lets a Massachusetts tenant end the tenancy, and it is a strong one. Where a tenant is removed from the premises or excluded from them by the landlord or the landlord's agent other than under a valid court order, the tenant may recover possession or terminate the rental agreement, and in either case recover three months' rent or three times the damages sustained, with costs and reasonable attorneys' fees. The same section voids any lease provision waiving a jury trial, any provision by which the tenant agrees that no act or failure to act by the landlord will be treated as a constructive eviction, and any agreement exempting the landlord from that liability. Massachusetts has no casualty or untenantability termination statute, and no age, disability, care-facility, senior-housing or job-relocation early-termination right. Ending a tenancy because the landlord will not keep the unit fit, and the defenses and counterclaims that go with it, are covered on the habitability page.

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

Massachusetts 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 anywhere in the estates chapter or the summary-process chapter. A landlord who believes a unit is empty must still give the statutory notice and bring a possession case; excluding a tenant or depriving a tenant of full use of the unit without first obtaining a valid writ of execution is an unfair and deceptive practice. Two provisions use the word without creating a trigger. Within three days of knowing or having reason to know that a property has been vacated through termination of tenancy, abandonment or other removal or exclusion of a tenant, the owner or a designee must inspect the property for abandoned animals and notify an animal control or police officer, on penalty of up to $500 for a first offense and $1,000 afterwards. And belongings left behind by a tenant who ends the tenancy under the victim section are deemed abandoned unless that tenant writes to say who is responsible for them. What happens to property left behind more generally is covered separately from this page.

There is no statutory delivery method for a Massachusetts termination notice. The statute requires only notice in writing given for that purpose to the other party: no personal-service requirement, no posting-and-mailing cascade, no certified-mail rule, and no presumption of receipt. Where a no-fault dwelling tenancy at will ends some way other than by a party's notice, the parallel waiting period is measured from the time the tenant receives written notice, so actual receipt matters on that route. Service by a sheriff, constable or process server belongs to the summons and complaint that start a possession case, not to the notice itself, and that is on the eviction page.

Electronic delivery: the termination statute is silent on it.

What the notice must contain: A no-cause termination notice must be in writing, must be given for the purpose of determining the estate at will, and must fix a termination date falling on a day when rent is payable. The date need not be written as a calendar date; it is enough that it is designated in general terms a landlord and tenant can reasonably understand as fixing a day certain. The notice may include an offer to establish a new tenancy of the same premises on different terms, and the statute says the validity of the notice is not affected by including such an offer. There is no statutory form, no advisory language and no requirement to state a ground for a no-cause notice. The cure-rights language and the state agency form that must accompany a notice to quit apply only where the notice is for nonpayment of rent, and those belong to the eviction page along with the requirement that the form's information be available in the five most common languages spoken in the commonwealth besides English.

Massachusetts runs the opposite way from the federal default on foreclosure. State law provides that a dwelling tenancy at will is not terminated by operation of law by the owner conveying, transferring or leasing the premises or by foreclosure, and a companion section deems a tenant occupying under an unexpired term or a lease for a definite term at the time of a foreclosure sale to be a tenant at will, while providing that foreclosure does not affect the tenancy agreement of a tenant whose rent is subsidized under state or federal law and that the foreclosing entity must assume the lease and the subsidy contract. Those rules stand on their own and do not depend on the federal Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act. Apart from foreclosure, the state's termination sections reference no federal statute; the federal service member protections enter through the militia chapter and are described above.

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 Massachusetts appellate decision construes the federal 30-day notice for covered dwellings. There is a piece of history a reader may run into. An emergency act of 2020 required, for the duration of the state of emergency, that a nonpayment notice to quit be accompanied by a form including an attestation as to whether the unit was a covered dwelling under the federal act and whether the notice complied with its 30-day notice provision. That requirement was tied to the emergency and is spent, and when the form duty was made permanent in 2022 the attestation was deliberately left out of the codified version. (Appellate picture read as of September 3, 2026.)

U-Dryvit Auto Rental Co. v. Shaw, 319 Mass. 684 (1946) (Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court; arose from a commercial lease; bears on ending a periodic tenancy): The notice section for ending an estate at will has been construed to mean that the notice must fix the time for termination as a day upon which the rent is payable, and the court applied that rule to uphold a notice served in late September that fixed the following November 1, a rent day, as the termination date. The date need not be stated as a certain day; it is enough that it is designated in general terms and may be reasonably understood by landlord and tenant as fixing a day certain. The tenancy at issue was of commercial garage premises, but the section it construes governs every estate at will by its own terms and the construction rests on a long line of earlier decisions.

Woodbury v. Sparrell Print, 198 Mass. 1 (1908) (Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court; arose from a commercial lease; bears on the duty to re-let): A landlord suing for rent after a tenancy ends must show not only that the premises remained unoccupied but that this was in no respect due to the landlord's own negligence, and the burden of showing due diligence in re-letting rests on the landlord. The court also held that the outer limit of the duty is a question of law rather than one for the jury: a landlord is not obliged to let the premises for a longer term or to combine other premises with them to get them let. The case arose from commercial business premises.

Atkinson v. Rosenthal, 33 Mass. App. Ct. 219 (1992) (Massachusetts Appeals Court; arose from a commercial lease; bears on the duty to re-let): A landlord may decline a surrender and tell the tenant that the premises will be re-let for the tenant's account; where the landlord does so, no acceptance of surrender is inferred and the tenant's rent obligation continues, reduced by the rental income the new tenancy brings in less the expenses of re-letting, and conduct the lease itself authorizes cannot be taken as a surrender. On the burden the court held that proving the landlord had not made a commercially reasonable lease, meaning had not been diligent in obtaining a reasonably fair rent, fell on the tenants. The lease was commercial, and this holding on the burden sits on the minority side of an acknowledged split.

Karaa v. Kuk Yim, 86 Mass. App. Ct. 714 (2014) (Massachusetts Appeals Court; residential lease; bears on the duty to re-let): Affirming a finding that landlords of a single-family home had properly mitigated their damages after the tenants stopped paying, the court set out the state of the authority on who must prove mitigation: the Supreme Judicial Court has put the burden on the landlord, this court took the opposite approach more than eighty years later, and the case law is uncertain. This is the residential decision on the point and the one that states the conflict in print.

Corcoran Management Co. v. Withers, 24 Mass. App. Ct. 736 (1987) (Massachusetts Appeals Court; a general statement of law; bears on the end of a fixed term): Collecting the older authority on what a holdover becomes, the court restated the rule that a tenant at sufferance must go without notice on the landlord's entry but becomes a tenant at will if the landlord permits him to remain and especially if the landlord receives rent, and that continued occupation with the landlord's knowledge and consent together with payment and receipt of rent at the same rate and on the same rent days is evidence sufficient of a tenancy at will without being conclusive, because the statute independently makes a tenant at sufferance liable for rent. Whether a new tenancy exists is a fact to be determined on all the testimony and the surrounding circumstances.