What to Include in a Share House Agreement
A practical checklist of what a share house agreement should cover, why the boring clauses are the ones that matter, and how it differs from your tenancy agreement.
·Mates on Rent
A share house agreement is not your lease. Your lease is between the tenants and the landlord. A share house agreement is between the housemates, and it covers the things the lease does not: whose turn it is, who owes what, and what happens when someone leaves.
It has no special legal magic, but it is worth writing anyway. The value is that it forces a conversation while everyone is still being reasonable, rather than at the point of conflict.
Money
This is most of the value, so be specific.
Rent per person. Not just the total. Write each person’s amount, so there is no ambiguity if the house splits unevenly by room size.
Due day per person. Aligning everyone to the first of the month is neat but often wrong. Line each person’s due day up with their pay cycle instead and you will get far fewer late payments.
How rent reaches the landlord. One person collecting and paying, or everyone paying directly. If one person collects, say when everyone else needs to have transferred by.
Which bills are shared, and how. List them: electricity, gas, water, internet, anything else. State the split method for each.
Bond. Who paid what portion, and how it will be returned. This is the single most common source of disputes when people move out, especially in houses that have turned over a few times and the original bond contributors have all left.
What happens to the empty room. When someone leaves before the lease ends, does the house cover the gap evenly, or does the departing person cover it until a replacement moves in? Decide now.
Living
Guests. Not whether guests are allowed, but at what point a guest becomes a resident. “More than three nights a week for more than two weeks” is a workable threshold. Partners effectively moving in without contributing is one of the most common share house grievances, and it is almost never addressed in advance.
Cleaning. Either a roster or an agreed standard. Rosters work better when they are specific about what the job includes. “Kitchen” means different things to different people.
Shared supplies. Who buys the things everyone uses, and how that gets reimbursed.
Quiet hours, if anyone works shifts or studies.
Common areas. Whether the living room is shared space or occasionally somebody’s overflow bedroom.
Leaving
The clauses people skip, and the ones that matter most.
Notice period between housemates. Four weeks is typical and roughly matches how long it takes to find a decent replacement.
Who approves a replacement. Unanimous or majority. Say which.
Final bills. How the last electricity or gas bill is settled after someone has gone, given it usually arrives weeks later.
Cleaning on exit and what happens to anything left behind.
What it cannot do
A share house agreement cannot override your tenancy agreement or state tenancy law. If your lease says no pets, an agreement between housemates saying otherwise does not help you.
It also does not change joint and several liability. If you are co tenants on one lease, the landlord can still pursue any one of you for the full rent regardless of what you agreed among yourselves. Your agreement determines what you can then reasonably ask of each other, which is worth something, but it does not shield you from the landlord.
For anything with real money attached, check the rules where you live. Fair Trading in NSW, Consumer Affairs in Victoria, the RTA in Queensland, and the equivalent authority in other states all publish free guidance for renters.
Keep it short and current
A page is plenty. A ten page document nobody reads is worse than half a page everyone has actually agreed to.
Revisit it when someone moves in or out, which is the moment the assumptions change and the moment people are most willing to discuss it.
The one thing an agreement cannot do is track whether anyone is following it. That is a different job: a shared record of rent paid, bills settled and chores done, visible to everyone. Mates on Rent handles that part, so the agreement can stay short and cover the decisions rather than the bookkeeping.