Quit notices in Lagos: the rules that void yours

Section 13(1) of the Lagos State Tenancy Law is where the notice periods come from, and it opens with five words most managers never read: where there is no stipulation. A stipulation, here, is a clause in the tenancy agreement setting out how much notice either side has to give.

So the periods in the table further down are a fallback. They apply where the agreement is silent, and it is silent surprisingly often. Six months applies to your yearly tenant not because the Law insists on six months, but because nobody put a notice clause in the agreement on the day the flat was let.

Where nine months go

The manager below is invented, though the sequence he goes through is not.

Tobi runs 62 units across Ogudu and Gbagada, plus a small block in Ikoyi. Flat 4 in the Gbagada block is a three-bedroom at ₦4.2m a year, and the tenant's rent ran out on 31 March without him either renewing or leaving.

On 12 April Tobi serves a letter giving him one month to go. It expires on 12 May, the tenant stays put, and Tobi files at the Magistrates' Court on 2 June.

In December the court strikes the claim out, meaning it throws the case out on the procedure without ever ruling on whether the tenant should leave, and it does so for two reasons.

The first is the length of the notice. The tenant had been paying a year's rent at a time for years after his original term ended, and because the way rent is paid points to the kind of tenancy you have (a rule I come back to under s.13(6) below), the court treated him as a yearly tenant, meaning one whose tenancy runs from year to year. Where the agreement is silent, a yearly tenant gets six months, so Tobi's one month was five months short.

The second is a notice he never served. Section 16 requires a landlord whose notice to quit has expired to serve a further notice, Form TL4, telling the tenant he intends to go to court and recover possession, and seven more days have to run on that second notice before s.24 allows the claim to be filed. Tobi went from the expired letter straight to the courthouse.

The money is not lost, because the unpaid rent is a debt in its own right and Tobi can still claim it. What he cannot get back is the nine months he spent on a defective notice, at the end of which the tenant was still in the flat and the notice sequence had to start over. That is the real cost of getting a notice wrong. It is not the case you lose, it is the nine months you spend losing it.

The tenant owed Tobi money for all nine of those months. That was never the argument the court heard.

Flat 4, Gbagada

Four areas where none of this applies

Before you work out a notice period, work out whether the Law reaches the address at all.

Tobi's Ikoyi block sits outside the 2011 Law entirely, so nothing in this post about its forms, periods or procedure governs what he does there.

What governs those four areas instead is contested. The 2011 Law exempts them and then says nothing about what applies in its place, so practitioners fall back on the older Rent Control and Recovery of Residential Premises Law 1997 (Cap. R6, its chapter number in the consolidated state laws) and on the common law, meaning the rules built up by decided cases rather than by statute. If your unit is in one of the four, that is a question for a lawyer rather than for a blog post, including this one.

Everywhere else the 2011 Law governs, which covers Lekki, Ajah, Yaba, Surulere, Magodo and the parts of Ikeja outside the GRA. Do not read the exemption as an island-versus-mainland rule, because it is not one: Apapa and Ikeja GRA are both on the mainland and both exempt, while Lekki is covered. The list can also grow, since s.1(3) lets the Governor exempt further areas by Order published in the State Gazette, which is the government's official record of such instruments. I found no such Order made since 2011, though I cannot prove none exists.

Notice periods by tenancy type

The half-yearly row is worth a second look, because the name suggests six months and the section gives three, the same as a quarterly tenancy. That is what it says.

The agreement beats the table

Because s.13(1) only supplies a default, a tenancy agreement that stipulates its own notice period replaces that default, and what the agreement says is what you serve.

The difference is worth real money. Six months of a non-paying tenant in that ₦4.2m flat is ₦2.1m you are chasing through a court list instead of banking. A notice clause is the cheapest item in this whole process, and the moment to settle it is at letting, while the tenant still wants something from you.

How the court decides what kind of tenant you have

Section 13(6) says that in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the nature of a tenancy is determined by reference to when the rent is paid or demanded. In plain terms, a tenant who pays yearly looks like a yearly tenant and a tenant who pays monthly looks like a monthly one.

The opening words, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, do as much work as the rest. They make this a presumption rather than a rule, so the payment pattern settles the question only when there is nothing else to go on, and a written fixed-term lease, your renewal correspondence and the way both sides actually behaved are all evidence that can displace it.

That presumption traps managers in the direction they do not expect, which is that you can end up owing more notice than you thought rather than less. A tenant signs a two-year lease in 2023, the term ends, he stays on, and you keep taking ₦4.2m a year. In your head he is still a fixed-term tenant whose term expired, which would put you on the quick seven-day TL5 route described further down. A court looking at those annual payments may instead find a fresh yearly tenancy, and hold you to six months.

Besides those two readings, the expired fixed term and the fresh yearly tenancy, there is a third. A tenant who holds over, meaning one who stays on after the term ends, may with the landlord's permission become a tenant at will, whose occupation either side can bring to an end at any time and who is therefore on one week's notice, rather than a periodic tenant, whose tenancy renews itself week by week, month by month or year by year. Which of the two he becomes depends on the consent given and on the evidence as a whole, and the Supreme Court worked through that in Odutola v Papersack (2006).

So do not assume which route you are on. The classification fixes the notice period, and serving the wrong period is what gets the case thrown out before anybody looks at how the tenant has behaved.

The second notice

Once the notice to quit expires and the tenant is still there, the instinct is to head for the court, and that is the step that fails: the expiry of the notice to quit is not what entitles you to file, because a second notice has to go out in between.

One piece of vocabulary before the section itself, because it trips people up. The Law says the notice to quit determines the tenancy, and determine here means brings it to an end rather than decides anything.

In order, then, what Tobi should have done that spring was serve the correct notice to quit, wait for it to expire, serve Form TL4 giving at least seven clear days, wait for those days to run out as well, and only then file. Two details on the TL4. Seven clear days means seven full days that do not count the day you serve it, and the grounds and particulars of the claim mean why you say you are entitled to possession and what you are asking the court to order. The filing itself is a summons in Form TL6A, with the claim written out in Form TL6B and attached to it.

Form TL4 turns up in other parts of the Law as well, so do not assume that every reference to it is describing your situation. The same form is the notice for a licensee under s.14, for abandoned premises under s.15(2)(a), and for persons in unlawful occupation under s.21.

A genuine fixed term skips the first notice

Where the tenancy really was for a fixed term certain, meaning a term with a definite start and end date, and it has ended by effluxion of time, meaning it ran out on its own date rather than being brought to an end by anybody, s.13(5) removes the notice to quit altogether. You serve Form TL5 giving seven days, and s.26 then entitles you to recovery once you prove the fixed term, its expiry and service of TL5. Those three things are the whole of what s.26 asks you to prove, and no Form TL4 appears among them.

That is much the faster route, which is exactly why it is worth being certain you are on it. What takes it away from you is the presumption in s.13(6): if the tenant has been paying yearly since the term ran out and you have no evidence pointing the other way, the court may read those payments as a fresh yearly tenancy and put you back on six months.

Licensees are not tenants

Section 47 defines a licensee as someone in occupation by mere permission, without a landlord-and-tenant relationship and with no estate or legal interest in the premises. On expiry or withdrawal of the licence, s.14 gives them a seven-day Form TL4.

Whether a particular occupant is really a licensee turns on whether they have exclusive possession, meaning the right to exclude other people from the space, and on what was paid and what was agreed. Seven days beats six months, which is what makes the label tempting, but being the faster label is not a reason to reach for it: if a court finds the occupant was a tenant after all, you served the wrong notice and you are back at the beginning.

Must the notice expire on the anniversary?

Under the older rule, a notice to quit had to bring a periodic tenancy to an end on the last day of its current period, so a yearly tenancy running from 1 April had to be ended on 31 March and a notice expiring on any other date was invalid. The Supreme Court applied that rule in African Petroleum v Owodunni (1991). The 2011 Law loosened the anniversary requirement, but it loosened it for some tenancies and not others, and the line is visible in the wording.

For those three kinds of tenant, in other words, the notice no longer has to land exactly on the tenancy's year-end or quarter-end date. The important part is which paragraphs the subsection names: it lists (c), (d) and (e), the quarterly, half-yearly and yearly tenants, and it does not list (a) or (b), the tenants at will and the monthly tenants, who are therefore left outside the relaxation.

A good deal of what is written online compresses this into "notices in Lagos no longer need to expire on the anniversary" and moves on, but the subsection does not say that, and monthly tenancies are one of the things it leaves out. I found no reported judgment settling whether the older end-of-term rule survives for monthly tenancies in Lagos. Until one exists, my own practice would be to time monthly notices to expire at the end of a tenancy month. That is a risk decision rather than a legal requirement, and what it buys you is the removal of an argument you would otherwise have to win.

Do not lean on Pillars v Desbordes

Sooner or later somebody will tell you that a defective notice stops mattering once you reach court. The source of that idea is Pillars (Nig.) Ltd v Desbordes (2021) 12 NWLR (Pt. 1789) 122, in which Ogunwumiju JSC said, in a concurring judgment, meaning one that agrees with the outcome but gives its own reasons, that once a writ is filed to regain possession any irregularity in the notice is cured. Landlords have been quoting the line ever since.

It is a thin thing to build a case on. The lead judgment, which is the one that carries the decision, did not rule on that point at all, because the ground of appeal raising it had been struck out, and Nigerian commentary, including a published case review, treats the passage as obiter, meaning a remark made in passing that does not bind later courts. The facts were a long way from yours as well, since the case concerned a 26-year developer's lease in Surulere rather than an ordinary residential recovery under the 2011 Law. Serve a notice that stands up on its own instead of one that needs rescuing.

What you must not do while the clock runs

That wording is wide enough to catch the shortcuts landlords are tempted by. Taking the roof off is altering the building with a view to ejecting. Changing the locks interferes with the tenant's access and can amount to attempted forcible ejection. Cutting the water is a breach of s.8(iv), which stops a landlord terminating or restricting a service or facility, although whether it is also the s.44 offence depends on what you intended and what can be proved.

Intent is an element in all of it, which is the practical reason to keep your temper out of writing. The WhatsApp message you send at the point of maximum irritation is the one that gets produced in court as evidence of what you meant.

Two provisions run your way, both of them inside s.13. Under s.13(2), a monthly tenancy where the tenant is six months in arrears lapses, and the Court shall order possession and the arrears once that is proved; s.13(3) does the same for a quarterly or half-yearly tenancy once the arrears reach a year. Neither one hands you the keys, though. What lapses is the tenancy itself, and neither subsection sets out a short cut to the courtroom, so assume you are still on the ordinary route of notices and a filed claim, and that nobody moves out until the court has ordered it.

One provision runs the other way, against you. Where a tenant has applied to the Court under s.37 for a declaration that a rent increase is unreasonable, s.37(4) means you cannot eject them while that application is pending. Note when it starts to bite: raising the rent does not by itself protect the tenant, but from the moment they file the application you are held off until it is decided.

The bill that would rewrite this

The published draft applies statewide with no geographic exemptions at all. It caps agency commission at 5% of one year's rent, tightens the limits on advance rent, and would require estate agents to register with the Lagos State Real Estate Regulatory Authority, LASRERA. Where you see the commission cap reported as 10%, that figure is LASRERA's existing ceiling on agency commission being mistaken for the Bill's proposed 5%.

None of it binds you yet, because a bill creates no obligation until it has been passed and commenced, meaning brought formally into force. Several outlets have written these clauses up in the present tense as though they already do.

If you manage stock in Ikoyi or on Victoria Island, the exemption you have been working under is the first thing the draft deletes.

Put the date in at letting

Where a tenancy needs notice, there is a date on which that notice would have to go out, and the time to work the date out is the day you let the flat rather than the day the tenant stops paying.

So put three things in the tenancy file from the start: what kind of tenancy this is, what notice the agreement stipulates, and the date you would have to serve for that notice to run out exactly as the term ends. For a yearly tenant on the statutory six months whose term ends on 31 March, that means serving by the end of September, and the date belongs in your diary from the day the tenancy begins.

Even served on time, the notice will not put you back in the flat on 31 March, and nothing you can serve will, because the end of the tenancy is not the day you get possession. After the notice to quit expires there is still Form TL4 to serve and then a court timetable you do not control.

Run the same arithmetic forwards and you can see what starting late costs. Serve six months' notice on a yearly tenant today, 2 August, and it expires on 2 February. Add the seven days on Form TL4 and the earliest you can lawfully file is the second week of February 2027. Work from that date rather than from the month you run out of patience.