Who pays for flooring in a commercial lease comes down to three clauses in your own lease. They cover alterations, surrender, and any tenant improvement allowance. In most strip-center leases, the tenant owns the floor finish. The landlord owns the slab and the building. With 26 months left and no allowance, a cleaned and densified slab is often a better buy than a coating.
We’re not lawyers, and we don’t read leases for a living. What we’ve seen, many times, is a tenant paying for a floor they didn’t need to buy. So pull your lease before you call anyone. Each section below points to a paragraph in it.
Which three clauses decide who pays?
Three paragraphs decide it. They’re rarely near each other in the lease.
Alterations and improvements. This clause says when you need the landlord’s OK in writing to change the space. Most set a dollar limit. Work under that limit needs no consent at all. A bonded floor coating, 20 to 40 mils thick, usually counts as an alteration. It isn’t a trade fixture, which is something you can unbolt and take with you. The coating can’t come up without taking some of the slab along. Find your dollar limit first. Lots of tenants ask for consent they never needed, and that hands the landlord a choice they weren’t going to make.
Surrender, yield-up, or restoration. This clause says what shape the space must be in when you hand it back. The mild version says broom clean, with normal wear and tear allowed. The costly version says you must put the space back the way it was on day one, or it lets the landlord make you remove your alterations when the lease ends. Find out which one you have. For a floor, it’s the most important sentence in the whole lease.
Tenant improvement allowance. This is money the landlord set aside for work on your space. Not every lease has one, and plenty that do have one nobody ever drew on. If yours has one, find three things: how much, the deadline, and how you draw the money. The deadline is a date written in the lease. Money you haven’t drawn by then is gone.
What does a tenant improvement allowance actually cover?
Allowance wording is broader than most tenants think, and narrower than most tenants hope.
Most landlords will fund work that makes the space better for any tenant. They say no to work that only serves you. A worn-out floor surface, a spalled slab (where chunks of the top have broken loose), or dust getting into your product: those are good cases, because the next tenant gets the fix too. A floor in your brand colors, a logo set into the floor, or a system built for one kind of business is a harder ask. The next tenant will want it gone.
Landlords also say no to cosmetic work on a floor that’s sound. If the slab is fine and it just looks tired, plan to pay for that yourself. Knowing that before you ask saves you a week.
When the allowance does cover it, a sealed slab from us runs $1.31 to $3.42 a square foot. Polished concrete runs $3.83 to $6.25, based on the gloss level you pick and the shape your slab is in. A coated floor runs $6.08 to $10.17. An allowance that covers even the low end of the sealed range changes the whole math. That’s why finding the deadline matters more than finding the perfect floor.
Allowances expire quietly
Most tenant improvement allowances end on a date in the lease. It's often the end of the first build-out. Nobody sends a reminder when it passes. Find that date before you price anything. Once it's gone, a floor the landlord would have paid for is one you pay for, and nobody says a word.
The restoration trap nobody selling a floor mentions
Most floor contractors won’t bring this up, because it argues against the sale.
Say your surrender clause lets the landlord make you remove alterations when the lease ends. Then a coating you put down today becomes a bill you owe later. A bonded resinous floor, 20 to 40 mils thick (a mil is a thousandth of an inch), doesn’t peel off. Getting back to bare concrete means shot-blasting or diamond grinding the whole floor. That’s the same prep work as a new install, minus the new floor that made the install worth paying for. On a 4,000 square foot suite, that’s a real bill. And it shows up at the worst time: the same month you’re paying for a move.
The fix is cheap and takes one email. Ask for a written waiver of restoration for this exact work, and get it before you sign a contract with anybody.
Landlords often say yes, because a coated floor in good shape helps them lease the space. But a verbal yes from a property manager who changes jobs in eighteen months isn’t a waiver. Get it in writing, and file it with the lease.
How much term do you need before a coating makes sense?
Term means the time left on your lease. It falls in one of three bands, and each band has a real answer.
| Time left on the lease | What you are actually buying | Scope that makes sense | What to ask the landlord for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under about 24 months, no allowance, no renewal in hand. | Two years of looks, not an asset. | Deep clean, joint and spall repair, and a penetrating sealer or silicate densifier at $1.31 to $3.42 a square foot. | Nothing. Don’t start a consent talk over work that changes nothing on the surface. |
| 3 to 7 years, a renewal option you plan to use, or an unused allowance. | A floor that lasts longer than it takes to pay for itself. | A polyaspartic or epoxy coating at $6.08 to $10.17 a square foot. Or polished concrete at $3.83 to $6.25. | A written waiver of restoration for this work. Also get it in writing that the allowance hasn’t run out. |
| 7 years and up, a purchase option, or you own the building. | An asset in a building you control. | Build it for the work, not the lease. Think full resinous coating, urethane mortar in wet areas, or polished concrete on a sales floor. | Nothing tied to the lease. It’s a normal capital decision. |
What if you have 26 months left? That falls between the first two rows. With no allowance and no renewal signed, treat it like the short band.
Most of these talks land there, so it’s worth more than a shrug. Start with a deep clean. Fix the cracks and spalls where cart wheels catch. Then put down a penetrating silicate densifier, a liquid that soaks in and hardens the top of the slab from the inside. That stops concrete dust and makes the floor look cared for instead of neglected. Nothing sits on top, so there’s no film to peel and no change in looks for an alterations clause to notice. On a 4,000 square foot suite, that work runs $5,100 to $13,450 plus the drive to your site. It’s the right answer often enough that we pick it over our own bigger job on a regular basis.
The middle band is where a coating starts to earn its keep, most of all when an allowance is sitting unused. The long band isn’t really a lease question at all. Build the floor for the work the space does, the way you’d make any commercial concrete flooring choice.
When is the floor genuinely the landlord’s problem?
Some floor problems aren’t finish problems. Telling them apart is worth money.
Some problems live in the slab itself, not the surface. Think of a crack that keeps moving along the same line, a corner that has sunk since you moved in, or a floor that heaves with the seasons. Water coming up through the slab, or in where the wall meets the floor, is a building and drainage problem. A spalled edge or a broken slab section that makes a trip hazard matters to the landlord too. OSHA 1910.22 says walking surfaces must be kept up and free of hazards, and the building is theirs.
None of that promises a result. What it does is change the question. “Will you pay for my floor upgrade?” turns into “I think this is a building problem. Can you take a look?” Those are different emails, and they get different answers.
Putting it in writing costs nothing:
“The floor in the northwest corner has dropped roughly 3/8 inch and cracked along the same line since we took possession in March. I am reading that as a slab condition rather than a finish condition. Can you have someone look at it before I price a finish over the top of it?”
That email does three things at once. It makes a dated record. It doesn’t tell the landlord what the answer is. And it shows you’re ready to pay for the finish yourself once the slab question is settled.
How do you raise it with a landlord you have to keep dealing with?
You still have to renew with this person. Keep the ask small, clear, and in writing.
Ask three questions in one short email, not three emails:
- Is this a building problem or a tenant problem?
- Is any improvement allowance left, and when does it run out?
- Will you waive restoration for a floor upgrade?
Attach one photo. Don’t attach a bid. A bid turns a simple question into a request for money, and it lands on the wrong desk.
If you get a yes on the waiver, get it in an email you can forward to your attorney and your insurer. If you get silence, that tells you something too. It points you back at the under-24-month band: a densified slab, and no consent talk to have.
The line between our scope and your attorney’s
We install floors. We won’t read your lease or tell you what it means.
Leases differ. The part that rules your floor may not be in the lease you first signed. It may sit in an amendment, a side letter, or an estoppel certificate (a signed note that states the lease terms). Call an attorney in three cases: your surrender clause is unclear, the landlord’s answer came by phone, or there’s an assignment or sublease in the chain. That hour of their time is the cheapest hour in the whole project.
What we can give you is the concrete half. That’s a written scope that names the system and how thick it goes on. It says whether it can come off, and how. It also says what the space needs versus what would just be nice to have. Your attorney can read that next to the clause. Nobody should read a floor bid and a surrender clause side by side and guess.
If you’re in the short band, our advice is to spend a little and wait. That costs us the bigger job, and it’s still the right call. If you’re in the middle or long band, or in a retail suite or a restaurant or hospitality space where the floor works hard every day, it’s worth getting a number.
Get a price for the floor your lease supports
Price the floor if your lease has the time left for it. If not, call us and we'll price the sealed-slab version. That's usually the cheaper job.
More on the sealer and densifier route for a short lease is on the sealed concrete floors page.
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