Texas Property Code Chapter 93: A Plain-English Reference for Commercial Landlords

Chapter 93 is short, and most of what matters in commercial work is in the lease, not the statute.

That’s the practical reality of Texas commercial landlord-tenant law. The Legislature deliberately left commercial relationships to private contract, on the theory that commercial parties have counsel and can negotiate their own protections. The result is a statute that runs only a handful of operative sections, mostly procedural, with one provision that actually matters in day-to-day commercial work: § 93.002 on commercial lockouts.

If you’re a Texas commercial landlord and you remember one thing from Chapter 93, remember § 93.002. The rest is background.

What the statute actually covers, and what it deliberately doesn’t

Chapter 93 is structured around a few specific landlord-side mechanics: commercial lockouts, utility interruption, and removal of property (§ 93.002), the commercial tenant’s writ of reentry after an unlawful lockout (§ 93.003), and a full commercial security-deposit regime (§§ 93.004 to 93.011). That’s most of the substantive content. Compare to Chapter 92, which runs roughly 100 sections covering everything from habitability to retaliation to application fees, and the contrast tells you what the Legislature intended.

What Chapter 93 deliberately doesn’t include:

• A general habitability obligation comparable to § 92.052. Commercial tenants take the property “as is” subject to whatever representations and warranties the lease contains. The implied covenant of quiet enjoyment provides some baseline at common law, but that’s it.
• Security deposits are the exception to this lease-only pattern: Chapter 93 does contain a full commercial security-deposit regime. The landlord must refund the deposit within 60 days of surrender (§ 93.005); bad faith is presumed if the deposit is not refunded or itemized by day 60 (§ 93.011(d)); a bad-faith landlord owes $100 plus three times the amount wrongfully withheld plus attorney’s fees (§ 93.011(a)); and liability for the deposit transfers to a new owner on sale (§ 93.007). A lease may modify these, but they are the statutory default.
• A retaliation statute. Commercial tenants who report code violations or exercise other protected rights don’t have anything like § 92.331 to fall back on. They can sue for breach of the implied covenant of quiet enjoyment or invoke specific federal protections (ADA, certain industry-specific rules), but the cases are harder to win than residential retaliation claims.
• A repair-and-deduct remedy. The residential remedy under § 92.0561 doesn’t apply commercial. Commercial tenants who want repair-and-deduct rights have to negotiate them in the lease.
• Detailed notice-to-vacate rules specific to commercial. § 24.005’s three-day default applies to commercial too, but most commercial leases override it with longer cure periods.

All of this is contractual territory. The Legislature decided commercial parties could handle it themselves, and the statute reflects that decision. The practical consequence: drafting matters far more on the commercial side than on the residential side.

§ 93.002: Commercial lockouts (the section that actually matters)

This is the operative Chapter 93 provision. Almost every commercial landlord-tenant dispute in Texas eventually touches it, because § 93.002 is the most powerful self-help tool Texas commercial landlords have, and it’s a tool that has no residential counterpart.

The mechanic. Section 93.002(c)(3) gives a commercial landlord a statutory right to change the door locks of a commercial tenant who is delinquent in paying at least part of the rent, and no lease clause is required to invoke it (a lease may modify the section under § 93.002(h)). That’s a significant power. Residential landlords cannot do this; § 92.0081 bars residential self-help lockouts entirely. Commercial landlords can. The leverage that creates in a commercial default situation is hard to overstate.

But the statute also imposes strict procedural conditions on the lockout, and missing any of them turns the lockout from a leverage tool into an unlawful lockout claim under § 93.002(g).

The conditions:

• A written notice has to be placed on the tenant’s front door. The notice has to state the name and the address or telephone number of the individual or company from which the new key may be obtained.
• The new key is required to be provided only during the tenant’s regular business hours and only if the tenant pays the delinquent rent (§ 93.002(f)).

That condition is what landlords most often get wrong in the other direction. Section 93.002(f) does not require handing over a new key on demand; the landlord must provide the new key only during the tenant’s regular business hours and only if the tenant pays the delinquent rent. The leverage is precisely that the tenant stays locked out, and its business operations stay disrupted, until it cures the delinquency.

A lockout that fails to provide the required new-key access is an unlawful lockout. Under § 93.002(g) the tenant may recover possession or terminate the lease, plus actual damages, one month’s rent or $500 (whichever is greater), and reasonable attorney’s fees and court costs. Most commercial leases also have liquidated damages provisions for unlawful lockouts that significantly exceed the statutory minimums.

What the lease can vary. Section 93.002(h) provides that a lease may supersede the statute’s lockout provisions, so the parties can modify these mechanics by contract: the hours during which keys are available, the specific notice contents, the dispute-resolution procedure. Absent a controlling lease provision, the § 93.002(f) requirement to provide the new key during regular business hours and only on payment of the delinquent rent is the statutory default.

When § 93.002 is the right tool. Strategically, the lockout works best when (a) the tenant is in clear monetary default, (b) the tenant has functioning operations the lockout will disrupt, and (c) the landlord has the documentation to defend the lockout if challenged. In commercial cases where any of those three is shaky, the lockout is the wrong move and Chapter 24 forcible detainer is safer.

When it’s the wrong tool. Lockout is the wrong tool when the tenant has a legitimate set-off claim or counterclaim (the lockout converts a clean default case into a messy mutual-claim litigation), when the property has been abandoned (lockout requires the tenant to be in possession to be meaningful), or when the lease has been terminated and the landlord wants a judgment for damages (the lockout doesn’t get you to a judgment, only to recovery of possession).

The rest of the statute, briefly

The other Chapter 93 provisions are operationally important but rarely produce significant litigation when handled correctly.

§ 93.003 gives a commercial tenant who has been unlawfully locked out a right of reentry, enforceable through a writ of reentry obtained from the justice court.

§ 93.004 is the commercial security-deposit section, not a personal-property section. The landlord’s handling of personal property left behind by a commercial tenant is governed by § 93.002(d) and (e). In commercial work with a contractual landlord lien, the lien procedure under Chapter 54 (§§ 54.044 to 54.048) usually displaces those default rules because it’s more landlord-favorable, and they control only where there is no contractual lien.

§ 93.005 sets the landlord’s obligation to refund the commercial security deposit within 60 days of surrender. The unlawful-lockout remedy discussed above is § 93.002(g), not a separate section.

§ 93.006 governs the landlord’s retention of part of the commercial security deposit and the required written accounting.

Beyond these, Chapter 93 leaves commercial deposit handling, habitability, retaliation, and most other operational issues to the lease. The lease drives those analyses. A commercial landlord with a poorly drafted lease has no statutory backstop on these issues; a commercial landlord with a well-drafted lease has near-complete contractual control.

Commercial eviction follows Chapter 24

Despite Chapter 93 being a separate chapter, commercial evictions follow the same Chapter 24 framework as residential evictions: § 24.005 notice to vacate (typically three days, though commercial leases often require longer cure periods), JP forcible detainer filing in the precinct where the property is located, trial within 10 to 21 days under SB 38, six-day waiting period before writ of possession, standard appeal procedure to county court at law.

The substantive analysis at trial is entirely lease-driven. The procedural rails are statutory. See the Commercial Eviction Procedures page for how commercial work actually moves through JP courts.

The hierarchy of sources in commercial work

When a commercial dispute breaks out, the controlling sources are, in rough order: the lease, common-law contract and real estate principles, Chapter 93 where applicable (mostly § 93.002 and the related lockout provisions), Chapter 54 for commercial landlord’s lien questions, Chapter 24 for eviction procedure, UCC Article 9 where lien enforcement involves personal property, and federal law (bankruptcy, ADA, certain industry-specific rules) where applicable.

The practical takeaway: commercial landlords who treat the lease as the operative document and the statute as a thin backstop end up with cleaner cases than landlords who try to lean on the statute to fix what the lease should have addressed. A well-drafted lease is the leverage. The statute is just the procedural rail it runs on.