Lagos quit notices: the two mistakes that void them

Tobi served his tenant a month's notice in April, filed at the Magistrates' Court in June, and in December the court struck the claim out. By then nine months had gone, the tenant was still in the flat, and Tobi had to start the notices again from the beginning.

Tobi is an invented manager, but both of his mistakes are real ones under the Lagos State Tenancy Law 2011. His notice was five months too short for the kind of tenant he had, and he went to court without serving the second notice the Law requires once the first one runs out. Either mistake is enough to get the claim struck out, and you can avoid both by checking a handful of things in the right order before anything goes out.

How Tobi lost nine months

Tobi runs 62 units across Ogudu and Gbagada, plus a small block in Ikoyi. Flat 4 in the Gbagada block is a three-bedroom let at ₦4.2m a year. The tenant's original term ended years ago, and since then he has simply carried on paying a year's rent at a time. This year his rent ran out on 31 March, and he neither renewed nor moved out.

On 12 April Tobi serves a letter giving the tenant one month to leave. It expires on 12 May, the tenant stays put, and on 2 June Tobi files his claim. In December the court strikes it out, which means it throws the case out on procedure without ever deciding whether the tenant should go. It gives two reasons.

The first is the length of the notice. Because the tenant had been paying yearly for years, the court treated him as a yearly tenant, and where the agreement is silent a yearly tenant is entitled to six months' notice. Tobi's one month was five months short.

The second is the notice he never served. Once a notice to quit has expired, the Law requires the landlord to serve a further notice on Form TL4, telling the tenant that he intends to go to court to recover the flat, and to wait at least seven more days before filing. Tobi went from the expired letter straight to the courthouse.

The rent itself is not lost, because unpaid rent is a debt and Tobi can still sue for it. What he cannot get back is the nine months. The tenant owed him rent for all nine of those months, yet the court never reached that question, because the notices failed first.

The order to work in

Most of these steps have their own section further down. The order matters, because each answer decides what the next step looks like.

1. Check the address. The Law does not reach Apapa, Ikeja GRA, Ikoyi or Victoria Island.
2. Work out what kind of tenant you have. How the rent is paid is the starting presumption, unless other evidence points elsewhere, and the answer fixes the notice period.
3. Find the notice period. Read the tenancy agreement first. The statutory table only applies where the agreement says nothing.
4. Serve the notice to quit and let it expire. If a genuine fixed term has simply run out, you skip this and serve a seven-day Form TL5 instead. Section 26 does not list Form TL4 among what you must prove on that route, so once TL5 expires you go to step 6. Licensees also skip this step and get a seven-day Form TL4 under section 14.
5. Serve Form TL4 and let at least seven clear days run.
6. File the summons on Form TL6A, with the claim set out on Form TL6B and attached.

Check the address

Before you work out a notice period, work out whether the Law applies to the building at all.

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

What does govern those four areas is disputed. The 2011 Law exempts them without saying what applies in its place, so lawyers fall back on the older Rent Control and Recovery of Residential Premises Law 1997 (Cap. R6 in the consolidated state laws) and on the common law, which is the body of rules built up by court decisions. If your unit is in one of the four, take that question to a lawyer, not to a blog post, including this one.

Everywhere else the 2011 Law governs, including Lekki, Ajah, Yaba, Surulere, Magodo and the parts of Ikeja outside the GRA. Apapa and Ikeja GRA are both on the mainland and both exempt, while Lekki is covered, which is why an island-versus-mainland rule of thumb gets this wrong. The list could also grow by Gazette Order, although I found no such Order made since 2011, and I cannot prove that none exists.

Work out what kind of tenant you have

The notice period depends on the type of tenancy, and section 13(6) tells the court how to decide the type: in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the tenancy is classed by when the rent is paid or demanded. A tenant who pays yearly looks like a yearly tenant, and a tenant who pays monthly looks like a monthly one.

The words in the absence of any evidence to the contrary matter as much as the rest. They make payment pattern the starting assumption, and only that. A written fixed-term lease, your renewal correspondence and the way both sides actually behaved can all point the court somewhere else.

This is where managers get caught, and the trap runs the way they do not expect: owing more notice than they thought, not less. Suppose a tenant signed a two-year lease in 2023, the term ended, he stayed on, and you kept taking ₦4.2m a year. You think of him as a fixed-term tenant whose term expired, which would put you on the quick seven-day Form TL5 route. A court looking at those annual payments may instead find a new yearly tenancy, and hold you to six months.

There is a third possibility too. A tenant who stays on after the term ends, which lawyers call holding over, may become a tenant at will if the landlord permits him to stay. Either side can bring a tenancy at will to an end at any time, which is why the Law gives it the shortest notice period, one week. The alternative is a periodic tenancy, like the yearly tenancy in the example above, which renews itself each week, month or year until someone ends it. Which of the two he becomes depends on what the landlord consented to and on the evidence as a whole, and the Supreme Court worked through that question 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 gets the claim struck out before anyone looks at how the tenant has behaved.

When a fixed term has genuinely run out

Where the tenancy was for a fixed term with definite start and end dates, and it has ended simply because its end date arrived, section 13(5) removes the notice to quit altogether. You serve Form TL5 giving seven days, and section 26 then entitles you to recover the premises once you prove three things: the fixed term, its expiry, and that you served Form TL5. Form TL4 is not among them.

That is much the faster route, which is why it is worth being sure you are on it. Section 13(6) is what can take it away, in the way the two-year lease example above shows: yearly payments since the term ended, with nothing pointing the other way, may be treated as a new yearly tenancy on six months' notice.

Licensees are not tenants

Section 47 defines a licensee as someone who occupies premises by permission only, with no landlord-and-tenant relationship and no estate or legal interest in the premises. When the licence expires or is withdrawn, section 14 gives them seven days' notice on Form TL4, the same form the Law uses for the second notice before filing.

Whether a particular occupant really is a licensee depends on whether they have exclusive possession, which is the right to keep other people out of the space, and on what was paid and agreed. Seven days is far quicker than six months, which makes the label tempting. If a court decides the occupant was a tenant after all, though, you served the wrong notice and you start again.

Find the notice period

Section 13(1) sets out the notice periods, and it opens with five words most managers skip: where there is no stipulation. A stipulation is a clause in the tenancy agreement saying how much notice either side must give. So the table below is a fallback. It applies only where the agreement is silent, and agreements are silent surprisingly often.

The half-yearly row catches people out, because the name suggests six months and the section gives three, the same as a quarterly tenancy.

A notice clause in the agreement replaces the table, and what the agreement says is what you serve. That clause can be worth real money, because six months of a non-paying tenant in Tobi's ₦4.2m flat is ₦2.1m you are chasing through a court list, and the time to settle the clause is at letting, while the tenant still wants something from you.

Does the notice have to end on the anniversary?

Under the older rule, a notice to quit had to end a periodic tenancy on the last day of its current period. A yearly tenancy that began on 1 April had to end 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 relaxed the rule, but only for some tenancies.

For quarterly, half-yearly and yearly tenants, then, the notice no longer has to land exactly on the tenancy's year-end or quarter-end. Tenants at will and monthly tenants are the first two categories in section 13(1), and section 13(4) does not mention them, so the relaxation does not cover them.

Much of what is written online shortens this to "notices in Lagos no longer need to expire on the anniversary", but the subsection does not say that. It leaves out monthly tenancies and tenancies at will. I found no reported judgment deciding whether the older end-of-period rule still applies to monthly tenancies in Lagos. Until there is one, my own practice would be to time a monthly notice to expire at the end of a tenancy month. The Law does not strictly require that, but doing it removes an argument you would otherwise have to win.

Serve the second notice before you file

Once the notice to quit has expired and the tenant is still there, the instinct is to go straight to court, and that is exactly the step that fails. An expired notice to quit does not by itself entitle you to file. A second notice has to go out first.

One word in the Law trips people up here. It says a notice to quit determines the tenancy, which means it ends the tenancy. That is easy to read as the end of the process, but the tenant is still in the flat, and a second notice has to go out before you can file.

In practice, Form TL4 must give at least seven clear days, which means seven full days not counting the day you serve it. It must also state the grounds and particulars of your claim, in other words why you say you are entitled to the premises back and what you are asking the court to order. When those seven days have run out, you file the summons on Form TL6A with your claim written out on Form TL6B and attached to it.

Form TL4 appears elsewhere in the Law as well, so not every reference to it describes your situation. The same form is used for a licensee under section 14, for abandoned premises under section 15(2)(a), and for people in unlawful occupation under section 21.

Do not count on the court overlooking a bad notice

Sooner or later someone will tell you that a defective notice stops mattering once you are in court. The idea comes from Pillars (Nig.) Ltd v Desbordes (2021) 12 NWLR (Pt. 1789) 122, where Justice Ogunwumiju of the Supreme Court, in a concurring judgment that agreed with the result but gave her own reasons, said that any irregularity in the notice is cured once a writ is filed to regain possession.

That is a weak foundation for your case. The lead judgment, which is the one that decides the appeal, did not rule on the point, because the ground of appeal that raised it had been struck out. Nigerian commentary, including a published case review, treats the remark as obiter, a comment made in passing that later courts do not have to follow. The case was also about a 26-year developer's lease in Surulere, a long way from an ordinary residential recovery under the 2011 Law, so the safe course is a notice that stands up without it.

What you must not do while you wait

Months can pass between the first notice and a court order, and section 44 makes several of the obvious shortcuts an offence.

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 the tenant. Changing the locks interferes with the tenant's access and can amount to attempted forcible ejection. Cutting off the water breaches section 8(iv), which stops a landlord ending or restricting a service or facility, although whether it is also the section 44 offence depends on what you intended and what can be proved.

Because intent is part of the offence, keep your temper out of writing. The WhatsApp message you send at the height of your irritation is the one that gets produced in court as evidence of what you meant.

Two provisions run your way, both of them inside section 13, and both can sound like a way round the notices. Under section 13(2), a monthly tenancy lapses when the tenant is six months in arrears, and once that is proved the Court shall order possession and payment of the arrears. Section 13(3) does the same for a quarterly or half-yearly tenancy once arrears reach a year. Neither one hands you the keys, though. What lapses is the tenancy, and neither subsection sets out a quicker route to court, so assume you are still on the ordinary route of notices and a filed claim, and that nobody moves out until the court orders it.

One provision works against you. If the tenant has applied to the Court under section 37 for a declaration that a rent increase is unreasonable, section 37(4) stops you ejecting them while that application is pending. The protection only begins once the tenant has filed that application, and raising the rent does not trigger it by itself.

The bill that would rewrite this

The published draft applies to the whole state with no exempt areas at all, so if you manage property in Ikoyi or on Victoria Island, the exemption you work under now is the first thing it removes. It would also cap agency commission at 5% of one year's rent, tighten the limits on advance rent, and require estate agents to register with the Lagos State Real Estate Regulatory Authority, LASRERA. If you see the commission cap reported as 10%, that is LASRERA's existing ceiling being confused with the bill's proposed 5%. Registration is not entirely new either, since firms that manage property already have to register with LASRERA under a separate law, which I cover in the post on LASRERA registration.

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

Put the date in at letting

Every tenancy that needs notice has a date by which that notice would have to go out, and the day to work that date out is the day you let the flat, not the day the tenant stops paying.

So put three things in the tenancy file from the start: what kind of tenancy it is, what notice the agreement stipulates, and the date you would have to serve for that notice to expire 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 first day of the tenancy.

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

Run the arithmetic forwards to see what it costs to start only once a problem appears. Six months' notice served on a yearly tenant on 2 August 2026 expires on 2 February 2027. Add the seven days on Form TL4, and the earliest you can lawfully file is the second week of February 2027, so work from that date instead of the month you run out of patience.