Month-to-Month Office Lease in Manhattan: Does One Exist?

What a startup means by a month-to-month lease, and why landlords decline

The request is usually this: a private office with a door, paid monthly, that the company can leave on 30 days' notice. It is a reasonable thing to want, and almost no Manhattan landlord offers it on a floor of its own.

The reason is how a landlord gets its money back. It spends on preparing the floor and on leasing it, and it recovers that spending over the years the tenant promises to stay. The standard lease here runs five to ten years. A tenant who can walk away next month gives the landlord nothing to recover against, so the offer is not made.

Holdover: the month-to-month arrangement nobody chooses

There is one way a real lease turns monthly, and it is expensive. When a lease expires and the tenant stays without a signed renewal or extension, the tenant is holding over. New York office leases usually price that at a multiple of the final month's rent. Some go further and make the tenant liable for what the landlord loses when the overstay costs it an incoming tenant.

Whether a holdover even gives you the right to stay month to month depends on the wording of your lease, so have your attorney confirm it. Two practical rules follow. Negotiate the holdover clause when you sign, because that is the only time it moves. And if you need extra weeks, get the extension in writing before the expiration date. Holdover explains the clause.

The two real options closest to a monthly lease

• A coworking membership. It is monthly and it is not a lease. It is priced per desk, at $800 to $1,400 a month in Manhattan, and it can be ended on short notice.
• A private floor on a short lease. About 12 months is the shortest term most landlords will sign, with 24 and 36 more usual, and a shorter term carries a higher rent per square foot. Furnished and pre-built floors are where short terms are found.

A sublease can run shorter than a year when little time is left on the original tenant's lease, but its length is fixed by that lease and not by your plan. Our playbook on short leases explains what landlords trade for a shorter term.

How soon a startup can be working in each

Coworking is ready in days. On a furnished private floor the gap between signing and moving in is two to four weeks, and the search and the lease come before that: six to eight weeks from a first tour is realistic on a pre-built floor. A team of 15 needs about 2,625 square feet, and the block on this page shows floors near that size with their asking rents.