How to Write a Roommate Agreement (The One-Page Version People Actually Use)

Nobody moves into a shared house planning to argue about bin bags. You move in on a good day, everyone is friendly, and the whole arrangement runs on a quiet assumption: reasonable people will behave reasonably.

Then it's March. The heating bill is higher than anyone budgeted for, one person's partner has been here eleven nights running, and whoever has bought the toilet paper since October has started leaving the receipts on the counter — face up, no comment.

That isn't a character problem. It's a documentation problem.

What a roommate agreement actually is

A roommate agreement is a written record of how your household works: money, chores, guests, noise, and what happens when somebody leaves. It sits alongside your lease, not inside it.

The lease is between you and the landlord. It covers rent, term, deposit and the state of the property, and it is completely silent on who cleans the shower, how four people divide one broadband bill, or whether a partner staying five nights a week should be contributing. That silence is where almost all shared-house conflict lives. (The lease still deserves its own conversation — here's what to agree before signing a joint lease.)

It doesn't need a lawyer, a notary or legal language. A signed page between adults is usually enough to be taken seriously if a dispute ever reaches small claims — but that's not why you write it.

Shared houses rarely break over the rules people agreed. They break over the rules everyone assumed.

Start with the money

Money is what people remember wrong, so write it down first and in numbers.

• Rent. Who pays how much, by which date, and to whom. If rooms differ in size, say why the amounts differ — the reasoning is what stops the resentment, not the figure.
• Bills. Which account is in whose name, how each one is split, and what happens if a bill lands higher than expected. Equal, by room, or by usage: pick a model deliberately, as in splitting rent and bills fairly.
• Shared spending. Cleaning products, toilet paper, bin bags, salt. Either a house kitty or a rule that whoever buys them logs them.
• Big purchases. A threshold — say €80 — above which a shared buy needs everyone's yes, plus a note of who paid what.
• A settling day. One date a month when balances get cleared. Debts that run for a quarter stop feeling like admin and start feeling like character judgements.

Wherever you keep this, keep it somewhere everyone can open. That's precisely the gap an app like Crew fills for shared households — expenses, splits, tasks and house documents in one place, so the agreement and the actual month don't quietly drift apart.

Write the chores at the level of "what done looks like"

Most rotas fail because they list a word, not a job. "Kitchen" means wiping a surface to one person and descaling the kettle to another.

So list every recurring task — including the invisible ones like chasing the landlord, buying the light bulbs and remembering the bin day — then give each one an owner, a frequency and a standard. "Bathroom: sink, toilet, shower, floor, weekly" is a sentence nobody can misread. There's a whole method for making this survive past week three in why chore wheels fail, and if the load is landing unevenly, the mental load is usually the reason.

Agree the social rules before they become grievances

This is the section people skip because it feels intrusive, and it's the one that saves the house.

• Guests and partners. A number of nights per week beyond which the house has a conversation. Not a punishment — a threshold. More on guests staying over.
• Quiet hours. Weeknights and weekends, written as actual times. See setting quiet hours.
• Parties. How much notice, and whether anyone gets a veto.
• Pets and smoking. Decided once, in advance, rather than in the week a kitten appears.

Write the numbers, not the vibe. "Be considerate" is not a rule; it's a Rorschach test.

Plan for someone leaving while everyone still likes each other

Every shared house ends. Deciding the exit terms early costs nothing and prevents the worst week of the tenancy.

Agree how much notice a housemate gives the others — a month is typical, and it's separate from the notice owed to the landlord. Agree who finds the replacement, and whether the rest of the house gets a say. Agree how the deposit is handled when one person leaves mid-tenancy: does the incoming housemate pay the leaver directly? And note who owns the sofa, because jointly bought furniture turns amicable into petty faster than anything else in the flat. If it's already happening, here's what to do when a roommate moves out early.

One page, signed, reviewed twice a year

Length is the enemy. A four-page document is a document nobody reads twice; one page is something people actually remember agreeing to. Keep the wording plain, get everyone to sign or confirm it, store it where the whole house can find it — not in one person's downloads folder — and put a reminder to revisit it every six months, or whenever somebody moves in or out.

And expect to change it. The agreement isn't a verdict on how you'll live forever; it's this month's best guess, written down so it can be improved rather than argued about. If a rule is being ignored by everyone, it was a bad rule. Rewrite it at the next house meeting.

The strange thing about roommate agreements is that the useful part happens before anyone signs. Sitting down to write one forces the four conversations most households avoid until the resentment does the talking for them. Thirty minutes with a shared page, once, and you've replaced a year of passive-aggressive sticky notes with a document nobody has to reread — because everybody already knows what it says.

Frequently asked questions