Move-out penalties

Leaving can attract a penalty in two situations, and they are different things:

Early exit — the resident leaves strictly before their contract end date.
Short notice — the resident gave less warning than the notice period requires.

Every move-out penalty is a payable charge, never a deposit forfeit. It is billed to the resident like any other charge. If it is still unpaid at settlement, it is netted against the deposit then — but until that moment it is a debt, not a deduction. The deposit's job is to secure damage, not to absorb penalties. See Deposits.

They never stack

Both are evaluated, and only the larger one is billed. A resident who both leaves early and gave short notice pays one penalty, not two.

The notice period

The required notice depends on how long the contract runs, counted inclusively of both the move-in day and the contract-end day:

Contract length	Notice required
31 inclusive days or fewer	15 days
Longer	30 days

A contract that spans a full calendar month lands in the 30-day bucket, not the 15-day one — only a genuinely sub-month stay is short enough to qualify for the shorter notice.

A resident who was already month-to-month when they FILED owes the longer period, whatever their original contract length.

Month-to-month does not begin when the contract ends. It begins when the notice window opens — before the contract end.

The window opens one notice period before the contract end date: 30 days out on a normal contract, 15 on a very short one. A resident who has not given notice by then has auto-renewed. That is the same window month-to-month uses everywhere else, and the same one the "MTM at Submission" column on the move-out notices screen reports.

So the test is: on the day the notice was filed, had the window already opened? If yes, 30 days. If no, the contract's own period.

Two consequences worth knowing:

Filing early, before the window opens, holds you to the contract's base period — even if the departure date you choose falls a little past the contract end. Staying a few extra days does not retroactively raise the requirement.
Filing inside the window, even before the contract end date has arrived, means the longer period applies — because by then the contract has already rolled over.

Staff can also set month-to-month manually; a manual flip dated on or before the filing counts the same way.

Your workspace configures the actual values; the shape of the rule is what is described here.

How each is priced

Both are priced the same way: the days involved, charged at each day's own calendar-month daily rate, starting the day after the move-out date. The move-out day itself is already covered by the final month's rent, so starting the window the next day is what stops it being billed twice.

Early exit covers the remaining days from the day after move-out through the contract end — capped at one month's rent. The cap is a policy value based on rent, deliberately not on the deposit actually held: a discounted or zero deposit must not change what leaving early costs.

Short notice covers only the days that were short, and is clamped to the notice period — a resident can never owe more than one full notice period for short notice, however late the notice was filed. A notice given the same day as the move-out owes one day less than the full period; only a notice filed strictly after the move-out day reaches the full amount.

The short-notice window is exactly the rent a compliant leaver would have paid for those days. A notice filed on the 8th for a move-out on the 31st, where 30 days' notice was required, gives 24 days and is 6 short — so the charge covers the 1st to the 6th of the following month.

Reading it afterwards

A filed notice stores the penalty in a single pair of fields, so an early-exit penalty and a short-notice penalty look the same once persisted. Which one it was is determined from the dates: if the move-out date is before the contract end, it was an early exit.

This matters for wording. A capped early-exit penalty covers less than full rent through the end of the window, so it should be described as "your contract runs until…" rather than "rent is owed through…". Getting that backwards overstates what the resident owes.

Deposit forfeit

Retired. New notices never forfeit a deposit — the value is always zero. The field survives so historical notices still display correctly, and a chargeable early exit is recorded in the short-notice fields. Do not reach for it.

See also Contract dates, Month to month and the Move Outs chapter for the screen itself.