My landlord's urgent repairs have dragged on for months — can I get a rent reduction or move out?

First forty days: you have to put up with it

Where repairs become necessary during the lease and cannot be deferred until it ends, the lessee is obliged to tolerate the work, although it may be very annoying to him, and although during the same, he may be deprived of a part of the premises. That is a deliberately unsympathetic phrase, and it means noise, dust, workmen and the loss of a room are not by themselves grounds for withholding rent. The premise is that urgent repairs protect the property you are living in, so the law asks you to absorb a period of disruption rather than treat every inconvenience as a breach.

Past forty days the arithmetic changes

The tolerance has a limit, and it is a hard number: If the repairs last more than forty days the rent shall be reduced in proportion to the time - including the first forty days - and the part of the property of which the lessee has been deprived. Read the parenthesis carefully, because it is the part landlords resist. Once the work runs past forty days the reduction is computed over the whole period, not merely the excess. The reduction has two variables, duration and the portion of the property you lost the use of, so both need to be recorded as the works go on.

When you can simply leave

The article's last sentence is the exit. Where the work is of such a nature that the portion the lessee and his family need for their dwelling becomes uninhabitable, he may rescind the contract, provided the main purpose of the lease is to provide a dwelling place for the lessee. Two conditions are doing the work there: the affected part must be what the household actually needs to live in, not a spare area, and the lease must be a residential one. A shop or a warehouse lease does not get this remedy from this article.

Keep the record the reduction will be computed from

Because both remedies turn on facts rather than on notice periods, the tenant who documents wins the argument. Note the date work began and every day it was suspended or resumed, photograph the areas fenced off or rendered unusable, and keep the messages in which the landlord or his contractor gave a completion date. Where the property has become dangerous rather than merely disrupted, Article 1660 is the stronger provision: it lets the lessee of a dwelling terminate at once, by notifying the lessor, where the condition brings imminent and serious danger to life or health.

Related provisions

• Civil Code, Article 1662 — Urgent Repairs During the Lease
• Civil Code, Article 1654 — Obligations of the Lessor
• Civil Code, Article 1660 — Dangerous Dwelling
• Civil Code, Article 1658 — Suspension of Rent