Four people signed one piece of paper. One of them has stopped paying and stopped answering messages. The other three assume they are each responsible for their own quarter, because that is how the money has always moved.
In most systems, on most versions of that document, they are wrong — and the moment they find out is usually the moment a letter arrives asking one of them for all of it.
That is the shape of this subject. The arrangements people live in have legal structures with names and consequences, the structures are chosen at the point of signing by someone who isn’t you, and almost nobody looks at them again until something goes wrong. By then the structure has already decided most of the answer.
This site explains the structures. What separates a tenant from a subtenant from a lodger, and why the difference is often more about how you live than what the document calls you. What joint and several liability actually does, mechanically. Who is party to a lease and who is merely occupying a room in one. Whether a roommate agreement is a contract, and if so, against whom. And how a shared tenancy ends — including the case where one joint tenant can end it for everyone.
Two relationships run through all of it and they are governed differently: the one between you and whoever owns the place, and the one between you and the people you live with. Almost every confusion in this subject is those two being treated as one.
Nothing here is legal advice. The law of shared occupation differs between countries, between states, and between jurisdictions inside a single country, and no page can tell you your position. What a page can do is tell you which question you’re actually asking, so that the twenty minutes you spend with someone qualified is spent well.
Latest posts
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Tenant, subtenant, lodger
Three positions with different consequences — and in most systems the label in the document does not settle which one you are. The facts of occupation do.
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Joint and several liability
Four names on one tenancy usually means each person can be pursued for the whole rent, not a quarter of it. The mechanism, and what follows from it.
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Whose name is on the lease
Being party to a tenancy and living in the property are different things. The gap between them explains most of what happens when a houseshare changes.
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Is a roommate agreement binding
Usually yes, between the people who signed it — and usually not against the landlord. Those two answers are what the question is really asking.
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How a shared tenancy ends
Expiry, notice, surrender, removal — four different mechanisms with different consequences, and one of them can be triggered by a single housemate.