Paste the lease text and get 35 clauses flagged by risk, each one quoted from your own document. The text never leaves this tab.
Open the PDF, select all, copy. A scan without selectable text will not work — see the note under the results.
Free, no account, no limit on how many leases you check.
Every finding quotes the sentence it matched, so a false positive is visible at a glance. If a quote is not in your lease, the pattern matched something unrelated — ignore it.
A residential lease is a form contract: the landlord or their lawyer chose the wording, and most tenants read it once, at signing, in a hurry. The expensive surprises are almost never hidden — they sit in plain sentences about automatic renewal, joint liability, or a deposit returned "within a reasonable time". This tool scans the pasted text against thirty-five patterns drawn from the clauses that show up repeatedly in deposit disputes and small claims filings, marks each hit by severity, and quotes the sentence back so you can see the context for yourself.
What it cannot do is apply your state's law. Whether a particular late fee is enforceable depends on statutes that differ by city, and a clause that is void in one state is standard in another. So the output is not a verdict. It is a list of sentences to look at twice, sorted by how often they cost money.
Take a 4,150-word lease for a two-bedroom apartment at $1,850 a month, deposit $2,775. Running the text through the checker returns nine findings. Four of them matter:
| Clause | What the lease says | Cost if you ignore it |
|---|---|---|
| Late fee | $95 on day two, then $25 a day with no cap | A payment that lands eleven days late costs $320, not $95 |
| Renewal | Converts to month-to-month at 8% above the current rent unless cancelled 90 days before the end date | Missing the window costs $148 a month for as long as you stay |
| Deposit return | "Refunded within a reasonable time after move-out" | No deadline means no leverage; some states require 14 or 30 days |
| Entry | Landlord may enter "at any time for inspection" | No notice period, which most states set at 24 to 48 hours |
The other five were medium or low: a $150 cleaning fee deducted from the deposit regardless of condition, a prohibition on hanging pictures without written consent, a requirement to carry renter's insurance naming the landlord, a sublet clause requiring consent "not unreasonably withheld", and a rule about not running a business from the unit. Each is normal-ish; each is worth a written question if the rest of the lease is aggressive.
Send the four high-tier items back in one email before signing, ask for an addendum, and keep the reply. A landlord who will not put a rent cap in writing has told you something useful.
The usual options are reading it carefully on a phone the night before signing, paying a tenant-side lawyer $200 to $400 for a review, or asking in a forum and getting answers from a different state. The scan sits between the first and second: it does not replace a lawyer for a high-stakes lease, and it is far more thorough than a tired read at midnight. It is free, it runs on your device, and it produces a written list you can send in one message instead of a vague sense that something felt off.
Photograph every page after signing, including any handwritten changes, and store the photos somewhere you will still have them in fourteen months. Put the move-in condition report alongside them. When the lease ends, the deposit argument is won or lost on those two documents far more often than on the wording of the clause, because the clause rarely says the landlord has to prove anything.
No. It is a scanner: it finds sentences in your lease that match known patterns, quotes them back, and explains what each pattern usually means for a tenant. It does not know your state's statute, it cannot tell whether a term is unenforceable where you live, and it does not read images. Treat the result as a list of questions to ask, not as a verdict.
Not as it stands. A scan is a photograph of a page with no characters underneath, so there is nothing to match and the tool will report almost no clauses found. That near-zero result is a signal that the paste was empty, not that the lease is clean. Open the lease in a PDF reader and try to select a sentence; if you cannot select text, type the clause you are worried about instead.
No. The text is processed by JavaScript in the tab and discarded when you close or refresh it. There is no upload endpoint, so there is no copy on a server to leak, subpoena, or forget to delete. The same design means it cannot save your history between visits, which is deliberate: a stored lease is a liability you did not ask for.
Thirty-five patterns. The ones that cost the most money in practice are joint-and-several liability, a late fee that compounds daily without a cap, a renewal clause with a short notice window, a deposit clause that skips the itemised statement, and a waiver of the right to withhold rent or repair-and-deduct. Those five account for most deposit disputes that reach small claims court.
Partly. Common-area maintenance, CAM reconciliation, and personal guarantees are more common in commercial leases and outside what the patterns were built to catch, but the deposit, entry, late-fee, and renewal checks still apply. Read commercial leases with a lawyer; the size of the obligation usually justifies it.
Lease Clause Check has no run limit and no page cap. All-Access applies to the file tools, where processing happens page by page.