Texas Landlord Repair Laws: What You Must Fix, and How Fast

Most San Antonio owners we talk to think Texas hands them a list. It does not. There is no statutory catalog of covered repairs, no line item for water heaters, no separate rule for air conditioning. Texas measures your repair duty by the condition, not by the inconvenience, and the entire framework turns on one phrase repeated through Subchapter B of Chapter 92: a condition that "materially affects the physical health or safety of an ordinary tenant."

That sounds vague until you see how it works in practice. It is actually the most useful sentence in the statute, because it tells you which of the twelve tickets in your inbox this month are legal obligations on a clock and which are customer service. Getting that sort right is the whole job.

One honest note before we start: this is a guide written by a property manager, not legal advice. Statutes get amended and specific facts matter. For a live dispute, talk to a Texas landlord-tenant attorney.

What you must fix under Section 92.052

Your repair duty attaches when three conditions are true at the same time, not one. Section 92.052(a) requires the landlord to make a diligent effort to repair or remedy a condition when:

1. the tenant specifies the condition in a notice given to the person to whom, or the place where, rent is normally paid;
2. the tenant is not delinquent in rent payments at the time the notice is given; and
3. the condition either materially affects the physical health or safety of an ordinary tenant, or arises from the landlord's failure to provide and maintain in good operating condition a device to supply hot water of a minimum temperature of 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

Two things in that list surprise landlords. The first is that a delinquent tenant does not trigger the duty. If rent was unpaid on the day the notice was given, the statutory obligation in Section 92.052(a) does not attach to that notice. That is a legal fact, not an operating instruction; ignoring a real health-and-safety condition because rent is late is how a manageable repair becomes a habitability defense in an eviction, and it does nothing about your own negligence exposure or your insurance carrier's expectations.

The second is the hot water number. 120 degrees Fahrenheit is the only temperature the repair statute names. Everything else is judged by the material-effect standard, but hot water gets its own subsection, which means a water heater that will not reach 120 is a statutory failure without any further argument about whether it materially affects anyone.

So what actually clears the material-effect bar? The statute does not enumerate, but the Texas State Law Library's landlord-tenant guide gives the working examples courts and agencies use: "sewage backups, roaches, rats, no hot water, faulty wiring, roof leaks." Those share a shape. Each one either lets the outside in, keeps a basic service out, or creates a hazard a reasonable person would not live with.

Condition	Almost certainly a Section 92.052 duty	Usually not, absent something more
Water	Sewage backup, active roof leak, total loss of potable water, no hot water above 120°F	Slow-draining sink, low water pressure, a dripping outdoor spigot
Electrical	Faulty or exposed wiring, a scorched outlet, a dead breaker feeding the kitchen	A burned-out bulb, a dead outlet in a detached garage
Pests	Roach or rodent infestation, especially where the entry point is structural	Seasonal ants after a tenant left food out, a single wasp nest on a fence
Structure	A breached roof, a rotted stair tread, a failed exterior door lock	Cosmetic drywall cracks, a warped cabinet door, worn paint
Climate	No cooling in a San Antonio August, no heat in a January freeze	A room that runs three degrees warm, an aging but functioning unit

Air conditioning deserves its own note in this market. Chapter 92 does not name air conditioning the way it names hot water. But a condition is measured by its effect on an ordinary tenant, and in Bexar County, where triple-digit afternoons run for weeks, a total cooling failure reaches the physical-health-or-safety standard in a way it would not in a milder climate. Section 92.0561(d) reinforces this by listing inadequate heating or cooling, when a local health or building official has certified the condition as material, among the narrow situations where a tenant may repair and deduct. Treat an AC failure in July as an emergency ticket, because a court in Bexar County will.

What you are not required to repair

The statute carves out three categories, and they are narrower than most owners hope.

Tenant-caused damage. Section 92.052(b) removes the duty for a condition caused by the tenant, a lawful occupant, a member of the tenant's family, or a guest or invitee of the tenant, unless the condition resulted from normal wear and tear. Read the last clause carefully, because it does most of the work. Nearly every failed component was "caused" by the person using it. The question is whether the use was ordinary. A garbage disposal that quits in year six is wear and tear. A garbage disposal packed with chicken bones is not, and the only reason you will ever be able to tell the difference eighteen months later is that your technician photographed the impeller and wrote it on the invoice.

Utilities you cannot reach. Section 92.052(c)(1) says the landlord is not required to furnish utilities from a utility company if utility lines are not reasonably available to the rental premises. This matters on Hill Country acreage outside Boerne far more than it does in Stone Oak.

Security guards. Section 92.052(c)(2) says the landlord is not required to furnish security guards. This is the provision most often misread as a general disclaimer of security obligations, which it is not. It says nothing about locks, deadbolts, or keyless bolting devices, and those are separately mandated elsewhere in Chapter 92. The absence of a guard is not a defense to a missing deadbolt.

How the tenant has to tell you (the two-notice rule)

Texas uses a two-notice structure, and the second notice is the one that creates your liability. The Texas State Law Library reduces Section 92.056 to four steps: tell the landlord by giving notice to the person or place where rent is normally paid, give the landlord a reasonable amount of time to make the repairs, send another notice in writing if the repairs are not made, and give another reasonable period of time.

Under Section 92.056(b), you become liable to the tenant only when all of the following are true: the tenant gave notice to the person or place where rent is normally paid; the condition materially affects the physical health or safety of an ordinary tenant; the tenant gave a subsequent written notice after a reasonable time to repair had passed, or the original notice was sent by certified mail, registered mail, or another form of mail providing tracking; the landlord has had a reasonable time to repair after receiving the notice; the landlord has not made a diligent effort to repair; and the tenant was not delinquent in rent at the time any required notice was given.

The certified-mail branch is the one landlords miss. A tenant who sends the very first notice by tracked mail does not have to send a second notice at all. One properly mailed letter, one reasonable period, and the liability conditions can be satisfied. Most tenants do not know this. The ones with counsel do.

The five-minute lease fix: Section 92.052(d) says the tenant's notice must be in writing only if the lease is in writing and requires written notice. If your lease is silent, a maintenance complaint made verbally to a leasing agent in a hallway is a valid notice that starts a reasonable-time clock nobody wrote down. Requiring written notice, and naming a single channel to receive it, converts an evidentiary problem into a timestamp.

How fast must a Texas landlord make repairs?

Seven days is the presumption, not the rule. Section 92.056(d) states there is a rebuttable presumption that seven days is a reasonable time to repair or remedy. The same subsection lists what rebuts it: the date the landlord received the tenant's notice, the severity and nature of the condition, and the reasonable availability of materials and labor and of utilities.

That is a two-way door, and owners tend to remember only one direction. Yes, a genuinely unobtainable part can justify more than seven days, if you can show the order date and the vendor's promised ship date. But severity cuts the other way just as hard. Raw sewage in a bathtub is not a seven-day condition. Neither is a dead compressor in a New Braunfels rental during the first week of August. In both cases a court is being invited to find that a reasonable time was two days, and the presumption gives you nothing.

Worth naming a definition here, because it decides most disputes: a diligent effort is not the same as a completed repair. Section 92.056(b)(5) asks whether the landlord made a diligent effort, not whether the work finished. An owner who dispatched a licensed vendor on day one, has the work order, the vendor's timestamped visit, and the parts-on-order confirmation, is in a materially different position on day twelve than an owner who did the identical repair on day six with no paper at all. Documentation is not administrative overhead in Texas repair law. It is the defense.

When the clock starts after storm, hail, or fire damage

After an insured casualty loss, the repair period does not begin until you receive the insurance proceeds. Section 92.054(a) is explicit: if a condition results from an insured casualty loss, such as fire, smoke, hail, explosion, or a similar cause, the period for repair does not begin until the landlord receives the insurance proceeds.

For a hail-belt market this is the most valuable subsection in Subchapter B, and it is conditional in a way that should shape how you carry coverage. The clock pause depends on the loss being insured and on proceeds actually arriving. An uninsured loss gets no pause. A slow claim you never filed gets no pause. We walk through the coverage side of this in our guide to landlord insurance in Texas.

The rest of Section 92.054 governs what happens while the property is unusable:

• Totally unusable (Section 92.054(b)). If the premises are as a practical matter totally unusable for residential purposes and the tenant did not cause the loss, either the landlord or the tenant may terminate the lease by giving written notice to the other any time before repairs are completed. The tenant is then entitled only to a pro rata refund of rent from the date the tenant moves out and to a refund of any security deposit otherwise required by law.
• Partially unusable (Section 92.054(c)). If the premises are partially unusable and the tenant did not cause the loss, the tenant is entitled to a rent reduction proportionate to the extent the premises are unusable, but only on judgment of a county or district court. A landlord and tenant may agree otherwise in a written lease.

Read that last sentence twice. The proportionate rent reduction is not self-executing; it requires a judgment. In practice, most owners negotiate an abatement rather than litigate one, and the ones who handle it well do it in writing, on the same day, with a defined end date.

What it costs you if you do not repair

Once you are liable under Section 92.056(b), the tenant picks from three remedies, and they are not mutually exclusive of damages. Section 92.056(e) allows the tenant to terminate the lease, to have the condition repaired and the cost deducted under Section 92.0561, or to obtain judicial remedies under Section 92.0563.

Remedy	What the tenant gets	Statute
Lease termination	Ends the lease, with a pro rata rent refund and normal security-deposit handling	§92.056(e)
Repair and deduct	Cost of the repair, capped at one month's rent or $500, whichever is greater	§92.0561(b)
Court order to repair	An order directing the landlord to take reasonable action to repair or remedy	§92.0563(a)(1)
Rent reduction	A reduction proportionate to the reduced rental value, from the first notice until the repair is made	§92.0563(a)(2)
Civil penalty	One month's rent plus $500	§92.0563(a)(3)
Actual damages	A judgment for the damages the tenant actually suffered	§92.0563(a)(4)
Court costs and fees	Court costs and attorney's fees, excluding fees for a personal-injury cause of action	§92.0563(a)(5)
Knowing waiver violation	Actual damages, a civil penalty of one month's rent plus $2,000, and reasonable attorney's fees	§92.0563(b)

Two procedural details change how these cases feel. Section 92.0563(c) gives justice, county, and district courts concurrent jurisdiction, so a repair suit can start in the same justice court where you would file an eviction. Section 92.0563(d) requires that in a justice court action the hearing be held between the sixth and tenth day after service of citation, which is fast by any standard. Section 92.0563(e) caps a justice court award at $20,000 excluding interest and court costs. That cap describes the forum, not your total exposure, because the tenant can file in county or district court instead.

The line worth internalizing: the civil penalty is one month's rent plus $500 before actual damages and attorney's fees. On a $2,100 Stone Oak rental, the penalty alone is $2,600 for a repair that likely cost a few hundred dollars to make on time.

How repair-and-deduct actually works

Repair-and-deduct is far more constrained than its reputation, and the constraints are all in Section 92.0561. A tenant cannot simply hire a cousin, fix a fence, and short the rent.

The cap. Section 92.0561(b) limits the deduction to one month's rent under the lease or $500, whichever is greater. Where the rent is subsidized, the cap is measured against fair market rent rather than the amount the tenant actually pays, which raises the ceiling on vouchered units. Section 92.0561(c) permits repairs and deductions as often as necessary so long as the total in any one month does not exceed that cap.

The qualifying conditions. Under Section 92.0561(d), the landlord must have a duty to repair under Section 92.052, the tenant must have given notice stating an intent to repair with a description of the condition, and the situation must be one of a short list: a backup or overflow of raw sewage or flooding from broken pipes or natural drainage inside the dwelling; a total cessation of the potable water supply; inadequate heating or cooling where a local health or building official has certified the condition as material; or another condition materially affecting health or safety that a local official has certified.

Who may do the work. Section 92.0561(e) requires that repairs be made by a company, contractor, or repairman listed in the yellow or business pages of the telephone directory or in the classified advertising section of a newspaper. The statute then bars the tenant, the tenant's immediate family, the tenant's employer or employees, and any company in which the tenant has an ownership interest from performing the repair, unless the landlord and tenant have agreed otherwise.

The practical takeaway for owners: most attempted repair-and-deducts fail one of these tests, usually the official-certification requirement or the contractor requirement. That is not a reason to relax. It is a reason to respond to the notice that precedes it, because the tenant who cannot lawfully repair and deduct can still terminate the lease or sue under Section 92.0563, where the numbers are much larger.

Can a Texas tenant withhold rent for repairs?

No. Rent withholding is not on the list of Texas tenant remedies. The Texas State Law Library states it plainly: "simply withholding some or all of the rent isn't an option under the law." Section 92.056(e) gives three remedies and none of them is withholding.

Section 92.058 is your remedy when a tenant does it anyway. Where a tenant withholds rent, makes repairs, or deducts from rent in violation of Subchapter B, the landlord may recover actual damages. And if the landlord first gave written notice of the illegality and the potential penalties, and the tenant then violated the law in bad faith, the landlord may recover a civil penalty of one month's rent plus $500. Section 92.058(b) allows that notice to be delivered in person, by mail, or to the premises.

Section 92.058(c) is the catch: the landlord bears the burden of proving, by clear and convincing evidence, both that proper notice was given and that the violation was in bad faith, with the prevailing party recovering reasonable attorney's fees. In other words, the written warning letter is not a formality you send after you decide to sue. It is the element that makes the penalty available at all, and it has to go out before the next violation, not after.

The related boundaries on what you can and cannot do while a dispute is live are in our guide to what a landlord cannot do in Texas -- self-help lockouts and utility shutoffs carry their own penalties and are never an answer to a repair fight.

The lease clause that has to be bold or underlined

Section 92.056(g) requires the lease itself to disclose these remedies in underlined or bold print. The subsection provides that a lease must contain language in underlined or bold print that informs the tenant of the remedies available under Section 92.056 and Section 92.0561.

This is the single most commonly failed item in DIY and template Texas leases, and it is failed in a specific way: the disclosure is present but set in the same plain type as everything around it, or set in all capitals, which is not what the statute asks for. What follows from a missing or non-conforming disclosure is a contested legal question rather than a settled one, and we work through the audit and the case law in detail in our post on the Texas Property Code Section 92.056 bold-and-underlined lease trap. For the purposes of this guide, the operational point is simple. The fix is one-time, it costs nothing, and it belongs in your lease template before your next renewal cycle rather than in a motion.

The other repair deadlines: smoke alarms and security devices

Subchapter B is not the only place Chapter 92 puts a repair clock on you. Smoke alarms carry their own seven-day rule with their own penalty, and it is a shorter path to liability than the general repair duty because it does not require any showing about health or safety at all.

Section 92.259(a) makes the landlord liable if the landlord did not install a smoke alarm at the time of initial occupancy as required by the subchapter or by a municipal ordinance, or if the landlord fails to install, inspect, or repair a smoke alarm within seven days after receiving the tenant's written notice of intent to exercise the statutory remedies. Section 92.259(b) permits a written lease to require that the tenant's initial request for installation, inspection, or repair be in writing.

Section 92.260 supplies the remedies: a court order directing compliance, a judgment for damages, a judgment for a civil penalty of one month's rent plus $100 for a violation of Section 92.259(a)(2), court costs, attorney's fees in certain actions, and unilateral lease termination without a court proceeding in certain cases.

Duty	Clock	Exposure if missed	Statute
General repair of a health-or-safety condition	Reasonable time; 7 days presumed	One month's rent plus $500, plus actual damages, rent reduction, costs and fees	§§92.052, 92.056, 92.0563
Hot water below 120°F	Reasonable time; 7 days presumed	Same as above; no material-effect argument needed	§92.052(a)(3)
Repair after an insured casualty loss	Does not begin until insurance proceeds are received	Termination rights and proportionate rent reduction	§92.054
Smoke alarm install, inspect, or repair	7 days from the tenant's written notice	One month's rent plus $100, plus damages, costs, fees, and termination	§§92.259, 92.260

Because the smoke-alarm penalty is triggered by the calendar rather than by a judgment call about severity, it is the easiest one in Chapter 92 to lose by accident. A single unanswered email about a chirping detector, seven days later, is a complete claim.

What this means in Bexar County and the surrounding cities

Chapter 92 is statewide, so the statute you owe in Alamo Heights is the same one you owe in Boerne. What changes across the San Antonio metro is the second track: municipal code enforcement.

State law is enforced by a tenant, in court, on the tenant's initiative. A city property maintenance code is enforced by an inspector, on a complaint or a program schedule, against the owner of record. They run in parallel, and an owner can satisfy one while failing the other.

Inside the city limits, the City of San Antonio adopts a Property Maintenance Code administered through Development Services and Code Enforcement Services, and complaints route through the city's 311 system. San Antonio also operates a Proactive Apartment Inspections Program, which is scoped to apartment properties rather than single-family rentals; if you own multifamily inside the city, confirm the current registration and inspection requirements directly with Code Enforcement Services, because program thresholds have been revised more than once since the ordinance was adopted. For a single-family rental in Stone Oak or on the near North Side, code enforcement in practice is complaint-driven.

Outside the city limits, the mix changes. Alamo Heights and Stone Oak sit inside Bexar County, but Schertz straddles multiple counties, and New Braunfels and Boerne are outside Bexar entirely, in Comal, Guadalupe, and Kendall County jurisdictions. Each municipality adopts its own property maintenance code and its own enforcement posture, and unincorporated Bexar County acreage may have no municipal code layer at all. The state repair duty does not move. The inspector on the other end of the complaint does.

One market-specific pattern worth naming: San Antonio's older housing stock, particularly the pre-1978 inventory inside Loop 410, produces a disproportionate share of the conditions that clear the material-effect bar the fastest -- cast-iron drain lines that back up, knob-and-tube remnants and undersized panels, and roof decking that fails at the valleys. If you own in those neighborhoods, the cheapest version of Chapter 92 compliance is a pre-lease condition assessment that finds those items before a tenant does, on a schedule you control instead of a seven-day one you do not.

Seven mistakes that turn a work order into a lawsuit

1. No written-notice requirement in the lease. Section 92.052(d) only requires written notice if your written lease requires it. Silence means a verbal complaint counts, and you will be arguing about what was said in a parking lot.
2. Treating seven days as a deadline instead of a presumption. Severity rebuts it. A sewage backup or an August cooling failure is judged against a much shorter clock, and "we were within seven days" is not the defense owners think it is.
3. Dispatching without documenting. Section 92.056(b)(5) asks whether you made a diligent effort. Without work orders, vendor timestamps, and parts-order confirmations, you have a story rather than a defense.
4. Missing the certified-mail branch. A tenant who sent the first notice by tracked mail does not owe you a second notice. If you are waiting for one, the reasonable-time clock is already running against you.
5. Assuming tenant-caused means not covered. Section 92.052(b) exempts tenant-caused conditions only where normal wear and tear was not the cause. The invoice that says which one it was has to be written the week of the repair, not the week of the hearing.
6. Sending the Section 92.058 warning after the withholding. The one-month-plus-$500 penalty requires that the landlord gave written notice first and the tenant then acted in bad faith, proven by clear and convincing evidence. Late notice forfeits the penalty.
7. Letting a smoke-alarm request sit. Seven days from written notice, and the civil penalty attaches without any argument about materiality.

How we handle repairs

You are the one who owns the property and carries the risk. Our job is to make sure the clock never runs against you without someone watching it.

Every lease we write for a Texas owner requires written maintenance notice through a single channel, so the notice date is a record rather than a recollection. Every request lands as a dated ticket and is sorted immediately into one of two buckets: health-and-safety conditions under Section 92.052, which are dispatched the same day and tracked against the seven-day presumption in Section 92.056(d), and everything else, which is scheduled. Vendors are licensed and independent, work orders carry timestamped photos before and after, and parts delays are documented at the time they happen rather than reconstructed later. When a claim is involved, we track the Section 92.054(a) proceeds date because that is when your repair period starts.

And because we charge a flat monthly fee rather than a percentage of rent, none of that changes when your rent goes up. Your management cost should not rise just because rent did, and it should never rise because a repair was expensive. We do not mark up maintenance.

If your tenant situation has already moved past repairs, our guide to the Texas notice to vacate covers what the notice must say and how Senate Bill 38 changed delivery as of January 1, 2026. And for the whole statute in one place, start with our Texas Property Code Chapter 92 landlord guide.

Sources and last reviewed

• Texas Property Code Section 92.052 - Landlord's Duty to Repair or Remedy
• Texas Property Code Section 92.054 - Casualty Loss
• Texas Property Code Section 92.056 - Landlord Liability and Tenant Remedies; Notice and Time for Repair
• Texas Property Code Section 92.0561 - Tenant's Repair and Deduct Remedies
• Texas Property Code Section 92.0563 - Tenant's Judicial Remedies
• Texas Property Code Section 92.058 - Landlord Remedy for Tenant Violation
• Texas Property Code Section 92.259 - Landlord's Failure to Install, Inspect, or Repair
• Texas Property Code Section 92.260 - Tenant Remedies
• Texas State Law Library - Requesting Repairs
• Texas State Law Library - Remedies for Failure to Repair
• City of San Antonio - Code Enforcement Services

Last reviewed September 4, 2026 by the Flat Fee Landlord San Antonio team. This article is general information for property owners, not legal advice. Confirm current statutory text and any municipal requirements before relying on a specific procedural detail, and consult a Texas landlord-tenant attorney for a live dispute.