A roommate agreement will not make you a tenant. It will settle most of the arguments that end shares.

You have found the room, the people seem fine, and you move in a fortnight. Nobody writes anything down at this point, on the reasonable-sounding grounds that everyone is being pleasant and it would be awkward to arrive with a contract. Then it is month five, someone has left for Chicago, and four adults are discovering in a group chat that they never agreed what any of this meant.

One line before the rest: none of this is legal advice. Both the law and any particular lease can differ from what follows and can change, so check anything you intend to rely on.

A roommate agreement binds you to each other and to nobody else

The lease is the contract with the landlord; the roommate agreement is a contract among the occupants. So a signed agreement between housemates does not make you a tenant, does not bind the landlord, and cannot override the lease. If the lease forbids subletting, an agreement between the four of you permitting it changes nothing except the number of people in breach.

What it does is create a record — what was promised, by whom, for how much, by when — between people who will otherwise argue from memory. It is generally treated as an ordinary contract between its signatories, which means it gets tested in small claims, and what decides it is paper.

Write down who is on the lease and who is not, before anything else

This single fact decides most disputes, and it belongs in the first line.

Shares here take one of three shapes. Everyone signs one lease, in which case liability is typically joint and several and each of you can be pursued for the whole rent rather than your share. One person holds the lease and the rest are informal occupants, who are not tenants at all. Or each room is let separately — the cleanest and the rarest.

Name the shape, the leaseholders, and the occupants who are not on the lease. Then write what those occupants are being promised: they have the least protection and this is the only paper they will hold. What goes wrong in each shape is set out in our guide to what a roommate in NYC actually costs and what fails in practice.

Rent needs a number, a date and a named recipient

Three things, and most agreements manage only the first.

The number. Each share as an amount, not a fraction, plus how it was arrived at — equal, or weighted because one room is larger or has the window. Then whether the split is fixed for the term or recalculated at renewal.

The date. Not the date the landlord wants the rent, but an earlier one, because whoever consolidates the payment needs it in hand before sending it. Then what happens if it is late: grace period, whether the shortfall becomes a debt between you, who covers the gap meanwhile.

The recipient. One named person, one payment method, so there is a record. Rent handed over in cash, or split across three apps because it was convenient that week, is rent nobody can prove was paid.

The deposit clause is the one you will actually use

Almost every share ends in a conversation about the deposit, and almost none have written down enough to have it quickly.

Set out what each person paid, who holds it, and where — and note this may not be one pot. The landlord holds the lease deposit; a leaseholder taking a separate deposit from a roommate is doing something else, and how New York treats that is worth establishing rather than assuming. A limit exists on what may be held as a security deposit on most residential tenancies here, amended in recent years; check the current rule and whether it reaches you.

Then the part people skip. What may be deducted, itemised rather than left to discretion. When it returns, as days after the room is vacated rather than "once things are sorted". And the evidence: a dated inventory and first-day photographs, held by everyone rather than by whoever decides on deductions.

Bills sit in one person's name, and that person carries the risk

List every account and whose name is on it. That person takes the credit consequences of a missed payment and the collection calls — a real cost, worth acknowledging rather than assuming away.

Then how each bill is split, equally or by usage, when it is circulated, and by what date the others pay their share back. Electricity earns its own line: a New York summer means air conditioning, and the July bill will not resemble April's. Settle in advance whether that spike is split equally or falls on whoever runs the unit hardest, because deciding it in July never goes well.

The leaving clause is the reason to write the thing at all

Everything above is administration. This clause earns the hour.

Say how much notice a departing housemate owes the others. It is a private promise between you, separate from — and often shorter than — whatever notice the lease requires, which may bind the people staying whether they like it or not.

Then the harder questions. Who finds the replacement, and who approves them: everyone, or a majority? If nobody is found, does the leaver pay to the end of the term, for a stated number of weeks, or until the room is filled? Pick one and write it, because the unwritten default is an argument. And say when their deposit returns: on departure, once a replacement moves in, or on a fixed date regardless.

Finally, the limit. Substituting a name on the lease needs the landlord's agreement, and no clause you write among yourselves can grant it. Your agreement decides what you owe each other; the landlord decides who is on the paper.

The small clauses are where the resentment actually lives

None of these ends a tenancy. All of them end friendships, which is why they go in writing while everyone is still pleasant.

On damage, a threshold stops every scuff becoming a negotiation: below it whoever caused it pays; above it the household decides together, with the day-one photographs as the reference. On guests, a tenant is commonly understood here to have some right to share their home with an additional occupant — narrower than the version people repeat, so check the current rule before relying on it.

Say now what happens when you cannot agree

Write the escalation while you still like each other: raise it in person within a stated number of days, then in writing, then a house meeting, then mediation, then small claims. Money disputes between occupants, if they go anywhere, tend to end there — check the current New York City limit, and keep the paper that would matter: the agreement, transfers with references, the photographs, the messages.

And whatever the provocation, never withhold rent as leverage against a housemate. It does not hurt them; it puts the leaseholder's tenancy at risk, and everybody's occupancy sits on top of that.

The document matters less than the hour it takes to write it

Most of the value is not the paper. It is that answering these questions out loud, before anyone moves in, surfaces the mismatches while they are cheap. Someone hesitates on the guest clause. Someone wants the leaving clause vaguer than you do. Someone will not sit down for an hour at all — itself the most useful thing you will learn.

The honest limit: no clause fixes incompatible schedules or different standards of clean. Those end shares, and they can only be discovered early, not drafted around.

If none of that appeals, there is the other version

Stagg is the arrangement with no counterparty to draft against. Every studio is private — its own ensuite bathroom, its own entrance off the hallway, nothing shared with anyone — in a 1902 landmark at 12 West 44th Street. No joint lease, no deposit held by a housemate, no cleaning rota, and we place nobody with anybody. Leases run from nine months upward.

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*Nothing on this page is legal advice. Rates are quoted weekly and billed every two weeks; availability changes, so please confirm before you book travel.*