Month to month
What happens when a contract reaches its end and nobody has left.
A contract has an end date, but a tenancy does not have to stop there. When a resident stays on past their contract end without signing a new one, they are month to month — billed a full month at a time, open-ended, until a move-out notice is filed.
There are two ways a reservation becomes month to month, and the difference matters.
Derived: it happens on its own
As a contract approaches its end with no move-out notice and no successor booking, the reservation is treated as month to month automatically. The window in which that happens mirrors the notice period: 30 days out for contracts longer than 30 days, 15 days for shorter ones.
Nothing needs to be clicked. This is the normal path, and it is why a resident who simply stays keeps being billed correctly.
Manual: staff force it
Staff can also force a reservation month to month explicitly. That overrides the derived logic entirely, on every surface:
- Billing rolls open-ended full months.
- The unit stays blocked indefinitely.
- Successor bookings are rejected.
It ignores both the contract-end window and the successor cutoff. Clearing it reverts to the derived behaviour.
Manual month-to-month is honoured only for live tenancies. A filed move-out date, a minpaku booking, or a cancellation always wins over it. So forcing it does not resurrect a tenancy that has already ended.
What gets billed
A month-to-month month is a full month, not a prorated one. The tenancy is no longer running toward a known end date, so there is nothing to prorate against.
Proration returns as soon as an actual end date exists — when a move-out notice is filed, the final month is prorated to that date. See Proration.
The trap: a stub month and a later notice
This is the one thing on this page worth reading twice.
When a contract ends mid-month and the resident stays a few days before a notice is filed, those days may already have been billed as a short stub — a part-month rent row, correctly prorated at the time and quite possibly already paid.
If a move-out date is later edited, the reconciliation that reprices rent rows has to decide what each existing row should now be. A stub billed for a post-contract-end holdover looks very similar to an ordinary prorated final month, and restoring it to a full month is wrong: it inflates a row the resident already settled correctly.
If a move-out date change offers to "restore" a short month to a full one, stop and check whether that month was a post-contract-end stub. Restoring a paid stub bills the resident for days they never owed, and because the row was already paid it surfaces as an unexplained balance rather than as an obvious error.
Reading a month-to-month reservation
- No contract end in the future is expected, not missing data.
- A full-month rent row after the contract end date is correct.
- A short row spanning the contract end is the stub described above — leave it alone unless you are certain.
See also Contract dates, Move-out penalties and The tenancy lifecycle.