My tenant moved out. Is a vacant unit exposed?

Updated 2026-08-04.

Status is judged as of January 5, 2026. What was the unit doing on that date? That is what the first year turns on, and an empty unit had nobody establishing residence in it.

Primary residence status is judged as of the taxable status date, January 5 of the preceding fiscal year. For fiscal year 2026-27 that is January 5, 2026, months before the law was enacted on May 28, 2026. Nobody could arrange their affairs around a rule that did not exist yet, which is part of why this year's notices are landing where they are.

A vacancy is exposed

Every qualifying relationship requires a person: the owner, a tenant or subtenant, majority interest holders, an immediate family member, or a trust's sole beneficiary. A unit standing empty between tenants on the status date has none of them in residence, and the adopted rule does not carve out that situation. Practitioners have flagged the gap. It is unresolved, not answered, and this site is not going to pretend otherwise.

The tenant path, precisely

  • The lessee or sublessee must be a natural person. A corporate lease does not establish primary residency, whatever the occupant does. The criterion in full is the tenant or subtenant path.
  • There is no one-year lease requirement. The final rule added documentation pathways for month-to-month leases and subleases, and for spouses of owners.
  • A lease is not arm's length if circumstances indicate a reasonable possibility that it was entered into primarily to avoid the surcharge. A lease signed to answer a notice is what that sentence is aimed at.

So the useful question is not whether the unit is rented today. It is who, if anyone, used it as a primary residence on the status date, and what shows it: the tenant's own income tax return carrying the address, or two of driver's license, voter registration, and utility bills, alongside the lease itself. The document set for that path is the lease, and the tenant's records.

If nobody qualified

Then the honest answer may be that the property is covered this year, and the live question becomes whether the value is right rather than whether the exemption applies. That is a different filing on a different calendar: see wrong value.

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