Commercial lease and retail shop lease rules in QLD

Before you argue about repairs, outgoings or a rent review, work out which kind of lease you're in. A commercial lease agreement in QLD and a retail shop lease are governed differently, and the difference decides what protections you have.

Retail shop leases in Queensland sit under the Retail Shop Leases Act 1994 (Qld), which imposes obligations on landlords that don't apply to ordinary commercial leases. If your lease is caught by it, you have rights you may not know about. If it isn't, the document itself is close to the whole story.

Which category you're in turns on the nature of the premises and the business, and there are exclusions. Broadly, the Act covers a lease of premises in a retail shopping centre, or premises used wholly or mainly for a business listed as a retail business in the regulation. A shop with a floor area of more than 1,000 square metres is excluded, and so are some other premises, such as those in a theme park or at a flea market. Confirm which applies rather than assuming, because tenants regularly assume they're protected when they aren't, and landlords occasionally discover they had obligations they never met.

Disclosure requirements under the retail shop lease rules

Where the retail shop lease rules apply, a landlord has to give the prospective tenant a disclosure statement before the lease is entered into. It's Form 7, and it has to be given at least seven days before the tenant enters into the lease. The tenant also gives a disclosure statement, which is Form 8.

The same seven day rule applies when a lease is assigned, which is what happens when a business is sold with its premises. If the assignment is connected to the sale of the business, the assignor's disclosure statement has to be given to the incoming tenant at least seven days before they enter into the contract for the sale of the business. In any other case, it has to be given at least seven days before the landlord is approached for consent to the assignment.

If you're buying a business with a shop attached, note that the disclosure obligation is triggered before you sign the business contract, not just before settlement. That timing catches people out, and getting it wrong has consequences.

What to check before you sign, whichever lease you're in

Start with the term, meaning how long the lease runs and what happens after it ends. An option to renew usually has to be exercised within a specific window, and missing that window can cost you the option. Diarise it the day you sign.

Then look at how the rent moves, whether by a fixed percentage, CPI, a market review or a combination. Ask what happens if a market review would take the rent down, because some leases are drafted so it can only ever go up. In a retail shop lease, that kind of ratchet review is prohibited, so is a review that lets a party choose between two or more methods, and the rent can't be reviewed more than once in each year of the lease.

Check the outgoings clause for what you're paying on top of rent, how it's calculated and what proportion is yours. In a retail shop lease, the landlord has to give you an estimate of outgoings and an audited statement of outgoings each year, and can only pass on your share of apportionable outgoings. Vague outgoings clauses are an easy way to end up in a dispute.

The repairs and maintenance clauses decide who fixes what. The air conditioning is the classic fight, and the answer is usually buried in a schedule.

The make good clause sets the condition you have to return the premises in at the end. It's a real and often large cost that tenants discover in the final month. If you're fitting out, agree now what has to come out later.

The permitted use clause says what you're allowed to do there. If it's too narrow, you can't change your business model without the landlord's consent.

The assignment clause covers what happens if you want to sell. A lease that makes assignment difficult reduces what your business is worth to a buyer.

Security might be a bank guarantee, a bond, or a personal guarantee from you as director. A personal guarantee means your own house may be behind the company's lease, and directors sign it without registering what it means.

For landlords

Missing the obligations has real consequences for a landlord. Get the disclosure right and get it out on time. Keep records of what was given and when. Make sure outgoings estimates and audited statements are done properly, because that's where disputes start. And be careful with consent to assignment, since there is now a set timeframe for responding to a request (more on that below).

The commercial instinct to keep a lease flexible and vague generally works against a landlord rather than for one. Any ambiguity ends up being resolved by someone else reading the document years later, long after the negotiation.

If a dispute starts

Most lease disputes are about money, usually outgoings, a rent review, make good, or a bank guarantee being called on.

Disputes about retail shop leases have their own resolution pathway. The parties must first attempt mediation through the Queensland Small Business Commissioner, and only if that doesn't resolve it does the matter go to QCAT, apart from urgent applications for interim orders. QCAT can't hear disputes about ordinary commercial leases, although the Small Business Commissioner can still help with those. In any lease dispute, the party who has kept clean records is usually in a better position, because these arguments are decided on the documents rather than on how strongly anyone feels.

Do not simply stop paying rent to force the issue. However tempting it is, it hands the other side a much stronger position than they had.

Recent changes to leasing law in Queensland

Queensland's Property Law Act 2023 (Qld) commenced on 1 August 2025, and parts of it touch commercial leasing. Among other things, it sets a process for asking the landlord's consent to an assignment or sublease, gives the landlord one month to respond once they have all the necessary details, and says consent must not be unreasonably withheld. It also releases an original tenant and their guarantors from liability for what happens after the lease is assigned again, and sets out the notice a landlord must give before ending a lease for breach. Many of these changes can't be contracted out of and apply to leases signed before 1 August 2025.

Separately, the Retail Shop Leases Act is under review by the Queensland Government, although no changes from that review had been made as at October 2026.

This article is current as at October 2026 and this is the part most likely to date. If you're negotiating or renewing right now, confirm the current position before you rely on anything you read, here or elsewhere. It's also a reason to be careful with older articles and precedent documents, which may be built on the previous framework.

Negotiating a lease as a tenant

As a tenant you will usually sign a document drafted by the landlord's lawyer, for the landlord's benefit, and you will live inside it for years. Almost all of your bargaining power exists before you sign, and very little remains afterwards.

Advice before you sign is worth far more than discovering a make good clause or an outgoings definition you didn't understand after the fact. Tenants who end up in disputes are more often the ones who never read the lease properly than the ones who negotiated hard.

If you're signing, renewing or arguing about a lease in Cairns

The questions worth answering early are which set of rules applies to your lease, whether the disclosure obligations were met, and what the document says about the thing you're worried about.

We act for both landlords and tenants on commercial and retail leases in Cairns as part of our commercial law work. If you've got a lease in front of you, or a dispute starting, get in touch.