A month, from either side
A monthly tenancy is terminable at will by either party on one month’s notice. C. Mathew and Co state it in those terms. It is the position an arrangement falls back to wherever no fixed term has been properly created, which is why it governs letting that was never reduced to a notarially executed document.
Read it from both directions before deciding whether it suits you. A landlord can end the arrangement on a month’s notice. So can the tenant, on the same month’s notice, which is why a monthly tenancy is a poor foundation for anyone who has spent money on the assumption of staying, or for an owner budgeting a year of income from it.
Give the notice in writing even where nothing obliges you to. The dispute that follows a verbal notice is never about whether a month is a month; it is about whether the notice was given, and when.
A fixed term ends differently
A lease for a defined period expires when the period expires. No notice is needed to achieve that: the term simply runs out.
Ending it early is a separate matter. Where a lessor wants to bring a lease to a close before expiry because the lessee has not observed its conditions, section 3 of the 2023 statute, the Recovery of Possession of Premises Given on Lease Act, makes a notice of termination a precondition of the action that follows. Notice first, proceedings after.
Notice does not bring the keys back
This is the part that catches owners out. A notice ends the legal relationship. It does not, on its own, produce an empty property.
If the occupant remains after the notice expires, the property comes back through a court and not through the landlord acting alone. Changing locks, removing doors and cutting off supply are not remedies the law provides, and reaching for them adds a second dispute to the one already running. Which step is the right one in a given situation depends on documents that an attorney-at-law has to read first.
The 2023 Act, and the gate in front of it
Act No. 1 of 2023 came into operation on 20 January that year. It supplies a dedicated District Court procedure for recovering premises given on lease, with its own decree nisi mechanism and its own timetable marker.
The procedure is not open to everyone. A landlord gets through the gate only if the paperwork answers to the definition of a lease agreement the Act carries for its own purposes, and that definition recognises two documents. One is a deed executed before a notary, in the manner the Prevention of Frauds Ordinance lays down. The other is an instrument of lease created under the Registration of Title Act. Each has to carry paid stamp duty. An owner who avoided the notary’s fee, or who left the document unstamped, meets the price of that economy on the day the Act would otherwise have helped.
The definition of premises, by contrast, is wide. It covers a building, or a part of one, together with the land attached to it; bare land carrying no structure at all; and a portion of a multi-storied building.
Which court, and what it can order
Action is brought in the District Court. Venue is generous: the district where the premises lie, where the lessee resides, where the cause of action arose, or where the agreement was made.
The relief available includes vacant possession, arrears of lease rentals, service charges, liquidated damages, and such further relief as the court considers appropriate. The breadth of that list is what allows the money claim and the possession claim to be brought in a single action rather than pursued separately.
On timing, the Act fixes one marker. Section 11 requires the court to specify a date by which the defendant may apply for leave to appear and show cause, and that date cannot fall more than six weeks after the decree nisi. F. J. and G. de Saram note that the decree nisi is served on the lessee by registered post within three days of being entered, either at the premises or at the address the lessee gave for service.
And where the Rent Act sits in all this
Section 34 of the 2023 Act has two limbs, and both point the same way. The first switches the Rent Act, No. 7 of 1972 off for any lease agreement executed once the 2023 Act had come into operation. The second addresses section 29 of the Rent Act, and states that it does not preclude a person from instituting an action under the 2023 Act. Between them, a qualifying lease made since January 2023 reaches the District Court with no Rent Act argument standing in front of it.
Everything else has to be checked. Where the agreement predates the commencement date, or was never a lease agreement within that definition, whether the Rent Act governs the premises turns on when the building went up, when it was first let, and which area it stands in. That test, and the exceptions written into it, are the subject of the companion piece: what the Rent Act reaches, and what it excepts works through the sections and the 1980 cut-off they turn on. Applying them to one particular property is a notary’s job, not an article’s.
| Monthly tenancy | Fixed-term lease | |
|---|---|---|
| What ends it | one month’s notice, from either party | expiry of the stated term |
| Ending it early | the same month’s notice | notice of termination on breach, section 3 |
| Precondition to acting | the notice, and proof of it | notarial execution, stamp duty paid, and the notice |
| Route to possession | court action | District Court under the 2023 Act |
| Court may award | as the general law permits | possession, arrears, service charges, liquidated damages |
The market this question tends to arrive from
The Central Bank of Sri Lanka reported that condominium sales volumes fell 15.2% in the first quarter of 2026. In that same quarter, its price index for new condominiums in Colombo District stood 18.5% above where it had been a year earlier. Prices firm, transactions thin.
An owner who cannot sell at the figure they have in mind may let the property instead and wait. That is a hypothesis about incentives, not a measured statistic: the Central Bank publishes transaction counts and a price index, not the reasons behind either, and neither figure says anything about the rental market or about how many owners are letting rather than selling. What does not depend on the hypothesis is the practical point, a letting entered into as a holding position has to be documented as carefully as one entered into for its own sake, because the exit is the part that goes wrong, and by then the documents are fixed.
Get the position checked before you act
Everything above states what the law provides. None of it tells you what to do about a specific occupant in a specific property, and it is not intended to. Notice periods, the availability of the 2023 Act, and the effect of the Rent Act all turn on documents and facts that have to be looked at. Take them to a notary or an attorney-at-law before serving anything.
What A1 can help with
A1 works in seven districts: Colombo and Gampaha, Kandy and Nuwara Eliya, Kurunegala, Galle and Matara. Houses, apartments and commercial space, and either side of a letting, owners looking for an occupant, occupants looking for somewhere to be. What we take on is tenant placement. We find the party, settle the commercial terms, then put both sides in front of a notary so the arrangement is written down in a form that will hold. Rent collection, day-to-day management and maintenance go out to specialist firms; recovering possession is legal work rather than agency work. The two places we are worth having are at either end of this problem, setting a letting up so it does not become one, and putting the property back on the market once it is yours again.