The duration during which the tenant is excused from paying base rent.
By Angel Campa, Founder · Updated March 2026
Free rent is one of the most valuable concessions in a commercial lease. Three months of free rent on a $30,000/month lease is worth $90,000 in immediate cash flow savings. Missing this during abstraction means the accounting team may begin accruing rent too early, and the tenant may overpay. Abatement provisions also define whether the free rent is forfeited upon default, which creates significant financial risk.
Stated in the "Rent" section or in a separate "Rent Abatement" or "Free Rent" clause. May also appear in an amendment or side letter. The specific months that qualify are often tied to the commencement or rent commencement date.
Lextract uses a combination of AWS Textract OCR and Claude AI to identify and extract the free rent period from your lease PDF. The AI searches for all pages of the document, then assigns a confidence score based on OCR quality and extraction certainty. Fields with lower confidence are flagged for human review.
Execution Date
The date the lease agreement was fully signed by all parties.
Commencement Date
The date the legal term of the lease officially begins.
Rent Commencement
The date the tenant is legally obligated to begin paying base rent.
Expiration Date
The date the lease term naturally concludes without renewal.
Lease Term (Months)
The total duration of the initial lease term expressed in months.
Possession Date
The date the landlord grants the tenant physical access to the space.
Most free rent provisions abate only base rent. The tenant typically still owes their share of operating expenses, real estate taxes, and insurance during the abatement period. Some landlords negotiate "gross free rent" that covers everything, but this is less common.
Many leases include a "clawback" provision requiring the tenant to repay abated rent if they default during the lease term. This effectively converts the free rent concession into a contingent loan, which can amount to tens of thousands of dollars in unexpected liability.
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