Must a tenant pay for normal wear and tear upon moving out?

Attorney Tom Olsen: Caleb, I want to cover one topic and that is this. Is that there are tenants out there that have been in an apartment maybe a year, or a house for a year, a couple years maybe, and they move out and there's just normal wear and tear. Carpets get dirty, paint gets smudged, et cetera, et cetera. Are tenants responsible for normal wear and tear when they move out?

Attorney Caleb Maggio: The answer to that is no, Tom. Tenants should not be responsible for that normal wear and tear. Now there's going to be some exemptions in your lease agreement. Sometimes drains, tenants responsible for unclogging those, changing filters in AC units, but the general rule is if you had a microwave in there, and it's 20 years old, and that breaks, and the life of that microwave is 20 years old, there's no way the landlord could come after you for that because that's just normal wear and tear.

Tom: Do you recommend to tenants that they take pictures of the place before they move out?

Caleb: Oh, absolutely, Tom. You should take a picture when you move in. Every time you renew your lease, you should update those photos and then at the end, you need to take move out pictures and a video is very important.

Tom: Let's go ahead and talk about what happens when a tenant does move out. Let's just say that the landlord is holding a $1,000 security deposit, for example. The tenant has not broken the lease, the lease has just come to its natural end, tenant is moving out, what does a landlord need to do to hold on to some or all of the tenant’s security deposit?

Caleb: The landlord needs to deliver the tenant a notice of withholding security deposit and that notice needs to be very specific, in that they're withholding X amount of dollars and it's for these lists of reasons.

Tom: If the landlord put in that list $100 for carpet cleaning, is that reasonable? Is that wear and tear that the tenant should not be charged for?

Caleb: Tom, I don't think that's really reasonable. I do see it a lot and what you can do as a tenant in that scenario is you can file within 15 days of receiving the notice that they're withholding your deposit. You could respond with your objections and then the landlord is then required to basically hold on to that deposit in a separate account. They can't take it just because they said they were going to take it and that has to either be resolved by some sort of settlement or a court action before that money goes anywhere.