29 million homes have lead paint hazards. The law only makes a landlord disclose what he already knows.

What it looks like from inside a rental.

In January 2025 a 28-year-old father in Utah posted to the r/legaladvice forum on Reddit. His family had been renting a house for just under a year. His one-year-old daughter's blood lead came back high at a routine checkup. The post has more than 5,000 upvotes. This is the paragraph most people stopped on.

The family found out because a pediatrician ran a blood test on a one-year-old. They were under a lease the whole time. The source in that case was water, not paint. That matters for the legal part of this page, because the federal disclosure rule is about paint. It says nothing about pipes.

What the federal disclosure rule requires.

The rule comes from Section 1018 of the Residential Lead-Based Paint Hazard Reduction Act of 1992, usually called Title X, codified at 42 U.S.C. 4852d. EPA and HUD issued the joint regulation in March 1996. It sits at 40 CFR Part 745, Subpart F, and covers the sale or lease of most housing built before 1978.

Under 40 CFR 745.107, before a lease or sales contract binds, the landlord or seller must:

• disclose "the presence of any known lead-based paint and/or lead-based paint hazards," along with whatever they know about where it is and what condition it is in;
• hand over "any records or reports available to the seller or lessor" about lead-based paint or hazards in the unit;
• give the tenant or buyer the EPA pamphlet Protect Your Family From Lead in Your Home;
• put a Lead Warning Statement in the lease or contract, signed by both sides.

Under 40 CFR 745.110, a buyer also gets a 10-day period to have the home inspected or risk-assessed before the contract is binding, unless the buyer waives it in writing. That section applies to purchasers only. A tenant gets no inspection period.

So the paperwork a tenant signs at lease-up is, in the common case, a record that the landlord knows nothing. It is filed as a compliance document. It does not tell the tenant whether the unit has lead in it.

The penalty and how often it is used.

Title X set the civil penalty for a disclosure violation at up to $10,000 per violation, using the penalty section of the Toxic Substances Control Act. EPA's December 2007 enforcement policy for the rule quoted the inflation-adjusted figure of $11,000 and noted that each required element missed in each transaction counts as its own violation. The $11,000 figure is what most secondary sources still quote.

The current figure is higher. EPA adjusts its statutory penalties every year in the table at 40 CFR 19.4. The January 8, 2025 rule (90 FR 1377) set the maximum for a 42 U.S.C. 4852d(b)(5) violation at $22,263 per violation. No 2026 adjustment was issued: the Office of Management and Budget cancelled the 2026 round in April 2026 (memorandum M-26-11) because the October 2025 consumer price index was never published during the lapse in appropriations. The 2025 figure is the operative one as of September 2026.

How often the penalty is applied is harder to pin down, because EPA does not publish a cumulative count for the disclosure rule alone. Its summary for fiscal year 2020 lists 89 completed federal lead-based paint enforcement actions, pooled across three rules: disclosure, Renovation, Repair and Painting, and Lead-Based Paint Activities. The disclosure settlements it highlights run from a few thousand dollars to $84,000, the largest being a Pennsylvania landlord with six leases at issue. Against roughly 32 million renter-occupied housing units nationally, the rule is enforced by exception.

Where the hazards are.

HUD has measured the national housing stock for lead three times: in 1998-1999, in 2005-2006 (the American Healthy Homes Survey), and in 2018-2019 (AHHS II). AHHS II visited 703 randomly selected homes in 78 areas across 37 states. Its lead findings were published in October 2021.

AHHS II estimates that 34.6 million homes, 29.4% of the 117.8 million occupied housing units where children are permitted to live, have lead-based paint somewhere in the building. A home has a "significant lead-based paint hazard" if it has deteriorated lead paint above a de minimis amount, dust lead above the action level, or bare soil lead above the action level. Under the older dust standard (40 micrograms per square foot on floors, 250 on sills), 22.3 million homes (18.9%) have a hazard. Under the standard EPA adopted in 2019 (10 on floors, 100 on sills), 29.0 million homes (24.6%). The 24 million figure in HUD Inspector General reports and most press coverage is a CDC approximation that sits between the two.

The hazard tracks the age of the building: 68.8% to 78.0% of pre-1940 homes, 2.8% to 4.7% of homes built 1978 or later. It also tracks income. Among households earning under $35,000 a year, 23.9% have a hazard under the old standard and 30.8% under the new one; above $35,000, 15.8% and 20.6%. Of the 15.0 million homes with a child under 6, 2.6 million have a hazard under the old standard and 3.3 million under the new one. Of the 5.4 million low-income homes with a child under 6, 1.6 million (29.7%) and 2.1 million (39.5%).

Two findings cut against the common assumption. Renter-occupied units had a lower hazard rate than the national average, 16.8% under the old standard, down from 25.2% in 2005-2006. Homes receiving government housing support had a lower rate than homes that do not, 11.1% versus 19.9%. HUD's grant programs and the Lead Safe Housing Rule for federally assisted housing appear to be working in the housing they reach. The private, unassisted, low-income rental is the housing they do not reach, and it is the housing the disclosure rule was supposed to cover.

The racial gap is a housing gap.

CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that in 2007 to 2014, 4.0% of non-Hispanic Black children aged 1 to 5 had elevated blood lead, against 1.9% of non-Hispanic white children. Twice the rate, in a period when the whole population's blood lead had already fallen far below where it was in the 1970s.

The sociologists Christopher Muller, Robert Sampson and Alix Winter reviewed the causes in the Annual Review of Sociology in 2018. Their summary is that lead exposure in the United States is socially stratified, that the stratification runs through where people live, and that the consequences depend on the child's social environment as well as the dose. Black families were concentrated by segregation and lending policy into the oldest urban housing stock while that stock was being coated in lead paint. The paint is still on the walls.

AHHS II shows some of that gap closing at the housing level. In 2005-2006, 28.3% of African American households had a significant hazard under the old dust standard and 42.0% under the new. By 2018-2019 those figures were 13.5% and 21.6%, a statistically significant drop. The same survey still finds the highest hazard rates in the oldest housing in the Northeast and Midwest.

The incarceration page on this site follows the same map forward twenty years, into the cohorts that grew up in that housing. The historical baseline page follows it backward.

Chicago wrote the lead into the code.

Most large American cities stopped installing lead water service lines by the 1960s. Chicago's municipal code required them for single-family homes and small apartment buildings until the federal ban on lead pipe took effect in 1986. The city has roughly 400,000 lead service lines, more than any other U.S. city, plus about 119,000 lines of unknown material as of its 2021 inventory.

Under Chicago's rules the property owner is responsible for the part of the line on private property and pays to replace it, at an estimated $15,000 to $26,000 per property. The city's Equity Lead Service Line Replacement Program covers the full cost for owner-occupied homes with household income under 80% of area median income. For everyone else, the city waives permit fees and connects the new line at the main. Illinois's 2021 Lead Service Line Replacement and Notification Act gives Chicago until 2077 to remove them all.

So a Chicago renter in a two-flat built in 1925 is very likely living behind a lead service line the city required, the federal disclosure rule does not cover it, and Illinois law gives the owner another fifty years. The service lines page covers what those lines do to infant blood lead. Nationally, EPA's 2023 needs survey estimated 9.2 million lead service lines; its November 2025 update, built from utility inventories, put the count at about 4 million.

The other way lead gets into a house.

In March 2021 the Tampa Bay Times, working with Frontline, published "Poisoned," an investigation of Gopher Resource, the only lead smelter in Florida. Using the company's own blood surveillance data, OSHA records and worker interviews, the reporters showed that hundreds of workers had blood lead high enough to raise their risk of high blood pressure, kidney damage and cardiovascular disease, that the plant had turned off ventilation and delayed repairs, and that the company knew. Some workers carried the dust home. One former employee sued over his son's exposure.

OSHA opened an inspection in April 2021 in response to the series. On September 30, 2021 it proposed $319,876 in penalties across 44 violations, 34 of them classed as serious and one as willful. The willful citation, for failing to provide adequate respirators to workers exposed to high airborne lead in four departments, carried $136,532 on its own. In January 2022 the Hillsborough County Environmental Protection Commission added about $518,000 in fines for environmental violations. When the three reporters answered questions on Reddit's r/IAmA forum in December 2021, the thread drew more than 16,000 upvotes.

This is a factory story until you follow the dust. Take-home exposure is a recognized pathway in the CDC's Adult Blood Lead Epidemiology and Surveillance program, which collects work-related blood lead data from 37 states. Workers in smelting, battery recycling, radiator repair, demolition and bridge painting bring lead home on clothing, in vehicles, and on skin. The child of that worker is exposed in a house that may have been built in 1995 and has no lead paint in it. No disclosure form touches this either.

The money.

The Health Impact Project, a joint program of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, ran the cost-benefit numbers in August 2017. Clearing lead paint hazards from every pre-1960 home where a child born in 2018 lives, about 1.07 million homes, would cost $8.4 billion in inspection and hazard control. Extending it to every pre-1978 home where a 2018 child lives, about 1.93 million homes, would cost $10.3 billion. Targeting only the low-income pre-1960 homes would cost $2.5 billion and return $1.09 to $1.39 per dollar in avoided medical, education and lost-earnings costs. That is one birth cohort. The next cohort moves into the same homes.

The federal program that pays for this work is HUD's Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes. Its fiscal year 2025 appropriation was $295.6 million for the whole office. Of that, $95 million went to the Lead Hazard Reduction grant program and $105 million to the Lead Hazard Reduction Demonstration program, $200 million for lead grants in total. The fiscal year 2026 President's Budget requested no new money for the program and proposed running 2026 on $273.2 million of unspent prior-year balances, which HUD estimated would treat about 23,600 homes.

At $200 million a year against a $10.3 billion one-time cost for a single cohort's homes, the federal grant program is funded at roughly two percent of the need per year. The disclosure rule was the part of Title X that cost the government nothing. It is the part that has run continuously since 1996.

What a renter can check without the landlord's help.

None of this is legal advice. It is a list of what the rule entitles a tenant to, and what a tenant can do on their own.

• The year the building was built. County assessor and property appraiser sites list it for free. Before 1978 means the disclosure rule applies. Before 1940 means a 68 to 78 percent chance of a hazard by HUD's survey.
• The disclosure form and the records. If the unit is pre-1978 and the lease is longer than 100 days, the landlord was required to give a signed lead disclosure and the EPA pamphlet before the lease bound, and to hand over any inspection reports in his possession. A tenant can ask for them again. If the form says "no knowledge," that is what it means: nobody looked.
• Dust and paint. Deteriorated paint on window sills, window wells and floors is where AHHS II found the hazards. A home test that reacts to lead in paint chips and settled dust tells you what the disclosure form does not.
• Water. A service line can be lead in a house with no lead paint. Many large utilities now publish service line inventories searchable by address. A certified lab water test is the way to know what is coming out of the tap.
• Blood. A blood lead test on a child under 6 is the only direct measurement of exposure. The Utah family found out that way, at a routine checkup, after a year in the house.

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